[rescue] A Question about Snap Servers

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sat, 31 Jul 2004 @ 01:00 -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke said:

> >I mean, I like the lunchbox sparcs, they're cute, but for the same or less
> >power and in the same or less amount of space, I'm building a 1Ghz Linux
> >box (or maybe Solaris x86, if it will work with the onboard ethernet).
> 
> And it still won't route packets any faster.  

Hmmm... I think this depends on how many clients it is serving.

My PC is a lot faster doing DNS and packet routing than my old Sun, but
my LAN is too small to need much power there.

> Also, it'll require me to fetch a keyboard and display should it ever
> decide not to boot, whereas the SPARC will happily answer to the
> console server.

This aspect of PCs is major suckage.  They are fine for a lot of tasks,
but the stupid video requirement gets in the way in almost all projects
where I would like to use them.

Most of the time I just buy an old UNIX box (usually Sun), but there are
times when I can't afford the horsepower I need in the used UNIX market.

Given the size of ROM these days, there is no reason they could not have
a serial BIOS on every motherboard sold, just disabled by default.

You would think the factories and OEMs would want this for better
automated testing.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["People should have access to the data which
you have about them.  There should be a process for them to challenge any
inaccuracies." -- Arthur Miller]