[rescue] Ultra 1 newbie q'ns

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Mon, 25 Dec 2006 @ 12:22 -0500, Magnus said:

> Steve Sandau wrote:
> 
> > One of my U1s is doing a great job of webserver/mail server running 
> > OpenBSD. I have been very pleased with OBSD's performance on older 
> > hardware of various types. including my SS5 and SS4 firewall/VPN boxes. 
> > And now I have used OBSD for desktop usage (with XFCE) utilizing 
> > packages and ports.
> 
> 
> I concur; OpenBSD is an excellent choice for some of these machines. 
> They still don't support multiprocessor on sparc architecture yet but 
> for something like the Ultra 1 it should work just fine.

I still find OpenBSD performance lags behind NetBSD, and for the most
part I find NetBSD to be as secure in a pragmatic sense.

I would like to run OpenBSD for my gateway machine, but right now my
experience is with NetBSD so I decided against it.

If I get more space/time, I might run OpenBSD and move gateway
operations totally over to a separate box.

> Though using the ports tree is an exercise for the extremely patient on 
> these machines. :)

It's not as bad as I thought it would be though.

I find most ports build pretty quickly on the U1 as opposed to the SS5
system I replaced, even though in some tests the CPU isn't a huge
improvement.

There are a lot of subtle improvements in the Ultrasparc over the
previous generation that start helping out under load and in certain
situations. You don't see it if you just run a benchmark.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["An Irishman is never drunk as long as he
can hold onto one blade of grass and not fall off the face of the earth."]