Re: Most hassle free sparc64 platform

One thing to be careful about is electricity consumption.  I had an old 
Compaq 6500 7u 4-way beast and once calculated it was costing $50+/month 
in electricity.

The 440 may be a great and cheap platform, but I suspect that a 
traditional pizza box form factor would use far less electricity.  I had 
an SS20 for years as a firewall/mail server and I think it would still 
do great.  Don't need that much horsepower for that...  I still have it 
around somewhere, it has a hyperSparc CPU in it.

I think I would look for an Ultra1 or an Ultra10.  There also seem to be 
a bunch of cheap SunBlade machines out there, but I don't know how 
OpenBSD copes with that hardware.

Chris.

On 10/3/10 10:26 AM, Rodolfo Conte Brufatto wrote:
> I have an Ultra1 and an Ultra 2 here running rock solid as well... I have
> some pretty old 'muscle' SPARCs.
> The only shame is that OpenBSD/sparc does not support SMP yet.
> I have one SS20 with 4x HyperSPARC modules 1mb cache each, with 512mb RAM,
> 73gb disk and 1 qfe... And I still cannot take the full advantage of it.
>
> BTW,
> You can get some V440, V490 on eBay very cheap tho. And they are pretty good
> ones.
>
> Regards,
>
> On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 2:10 PM, Simon Kuhnle<[email protected]>  wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Oct 03, 2010 at 04:37:36PM +0100, Chris Smith wrote:
>>> What is considered to be a relatively hassle free sparc64 box to run
>>> OpenBSD 4.7/4.8 on?
>>>
>>> Requirements are fairly minimal: headless, MP if possible.  To
>>> support: NAT via pf, apache, postfix, shell for 2-3 users.
>>>
>>> Was looking at Ultra30/60 as they are cheap here in the UK.  Any
>>> comments/experiences to share?
>>
>> Ultra 60 works fine for me here, running 4.8-current
>> (but releases should work, too, of course).
>>
>> I'm doing some IRC, Web, Mail and playing with Nagios.
>>
>> I have two 360 Mhz CPUs in it and serial works fine, too,
>> with a DB9-to-RJ45-connector (though it must be 'crossed' IIRC,
>> as some pins are weird, perhaps somebody else can tell more).
>>
>> So the headless part is no problem, but if you need a monitor,
>> you should get a 13W3-to-VGA adapater.
>>
>> Works very nice and stable and for your requirements
>> it should totally suffice IMHO, so go for it ;-)
>>
>> Regards,
>> Simon