[SunRescue] howdy, and question about utility of old sparcstations

[James Lockwood]

On Fri, 22 Dec 2000, Steve Pacenka wrote:

> One idea is to make network-attached-storage devices that could be used by a 
> work group for auxiliary storage and remote file access.  The specs on a 
> Sparcstation 2 look about like a high-end 486, as far as CPU and disk 
> performance go; not bad for Linux or NetBSD.

You'll find out that while CPU-wise the sun4c family are comparable to 486
systems, I/O performance and context switching is significantly better.
32-bit Sbus at 100MB/s beats out 16-bit ISA by a wide margin and even
gives PCI a run for its money.  Having builtin ethernet and SCSI also
makes these old workhorses quite useful.

My choice would be to load up the SparcStation 2's (and possibly one or
both of the 1+'s if you need them) with as much RAM and disk as possible
and designate them as the servers (I'd run them headless myself).  Run the
rest as diskless or small-disk X terminals.  An IPC has a nice small
form-factor and if all it runs is an X server can still be fairly snappy. 

The OS choice is often a religious one, but let me suggest that you
consider all of the alternatives.  Though some will claim it will run like
a dog I still feel that Solaris makes a good choice for a server with at
least 64MB RAM, especially if you're serving NFS.  Cut out unnecessary
daemons, don't run anything X related and it will do quite well.  I still
have a SS2 with 64MB running Solaris 7 in production, and I can't bring
myself to replace it when it still does everything it needs to do so well.

With a package like UColumbia Xkernel (based on SunOS 4) you only need 4MB
to run a barebones diskless X terminal, but 8MB is recommended.  There are
also BSD and Linux based alternatives but my impression has been that they
require more resources and are a bit slower on this old hardware.

I was happy running Xkernel on a Sun 3/60 (20MHz 68020) with 8MB RAM and 2
monitors (cg6 and bw2), FYI. 

-James