[rescue] The time has come, the walrus said

[Mike Parson]

On Fri, Apr 22, 2005 at 09:46:05AM -0500, Wes Will wrote:
> to talk of many things;  Of sailing ships and sealing wax, and I have not
> uncovered any of the token ring cd's, but I've got a student worker and
> another sysadmin looking for me as well.  You are not forgotten, I just
> have nothing to give you yet.  Sorry, John Schmidt.  I'm still trying to
> find them in the renovated library nightmare.
> 
> On to new business for me.  What would be my best choice for an operating
> system, please discuss it amongst the group, for a SparcStation20.  I have
> several 4-gig drives available, the one internal and two more in external
> boxen, so storage isn't an issue.  The beast has one sm81 processor, and
> only 64 megs of RAM.  I don't have any bux for adding memory, but I think I
> have another SuperSPARC CPU board around, it would be an sm71.  (Secondary
> question, would the 71 and the 81 do any good together?  Would it be worth
> the hassle?  Would there be any hassle?)

My choice for an OS would be NetBSD.  Freely available, easily tuned to
your needs, pkgsrc makes getting the packages you need easy enough.  And
since 2.0, NetBSD/sparc supports SMP.

As far as mixing your SM81 and SM71 processors, there have been rumors
of people doing this under Solaris, but I've never personally seen it
happen.

> What O/S is of course dependent upon function, and this is supposed to be a
> network monitor box hooked into our campus ethernet.  It will have to be
> something open-source (RRDTools? something like that rings a bell), to keep
> the Cisco managed switches listed and SNMP'd, or at the very least their
> status checked.

rrdtool, mrtg, snort, etc, all available.

> There is of course no campus budget money for this.  Any expenses will have
> to come out of my hide, and the skin's pretty thin these days.
> 
> I have this SS20, salvaged/scavenged, and a box of oddball parts to go with
> it.  The campus network is a free-for-all out there, and I need to see
> what's going on.  I've used this box before, running Aurora Linux and
> BigBrother to do a pretty decent job of watching some servers, but I'd like
> opinions on the best choice for this function.  I think it could do a
> decent job, and I want to put this nice old Sparc back in service if it can
> handle what I need.

BB is good for having a look and reporting on what it sees, if you
want it to take action on events, you're better of with something like
Nagios.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org