Re: Most hassle free sparc64 platform

Le lundi 04 octobre 2010 C  14:27 +0200, T. Ribbrock a C)crit :
> On Sun, Oct 03, 2010 at 03:48:32PM -0400, Alexandre Gauthier wrote:
> > I would like to cast my vote for an Ultra 10 as well -- I have one as my
> > DNS server. The main reason would be that it accepts commodity x86
> > hardware (memory, hard drives, cdrom drive, VGA output), so spare parts
> > aren't that difficult to find :)
> 
> Well, yes it does, but there are catches: The IDE controller is
> notoriously slow (not even DMA, IIRC), which is one of the reasons why I
> use(d) my U10s with SCSI-drives. 

Oh, I did not know that -- the U10 I use is mainly a DNS server, it
feels slow-ish, but IO never became a bottleneck for its workload so I
never really noticed that. Now that you mention it that would explain
why CVS takes forever to update the source tree :)

> The case is a nightmare - you have to
> turn the whole thing upside down just to open it - very annoying in some
> situations. And how they managed to make it that difficult just to swap
> a HD is anyones guess... :-}

Ah yes, that is indeed horrid, I had sort of pushed that out of memory
as well.

> Also, there is at least one series of U510 motherboards that suffers
> from "dying capacitor syndrome" - the buffer caps of the CPU will start
> bulging and leaking and subsequently cease functioning, causing the
> machine to become unstable. So far, I've had three of these motherboards
> going bad, all the same revision. The slightly younger one I have in my
> remaining U10 seems to have different caps - here's to hoping that they
> last longer.
> 

I did not know that either! Mine has been running fine for years so I
wasn't aware of that risk :(

> 
> > Its power consumption is acceptable,
> 
> My experience: My U10/440 when I still used it as home firewall cum
> server with 1xSCSI and 1xIDE was about 80W idle. Less than the U1 I was
> using before but some 10W more than the dual PIII/600 I replaced it
> with - which was also faster and less noisy.
> 
> *If* you go for an U10-like machine, I'd look at an AXi-based machine as
> well - same CPUs, same memory, but UW-SCSI instead of IDE and the mobo
> is ATX-formfactor => can be mounted in a case of your choice. For some
> odd reasons, however, information about them is hard to come by - even
> Sun seems to hide it...
> 
> Oh, and another data point: I did experiment with EIDE-controllers in
> the U10 at some point (Promise ATA66 and ATA100) and that seemed to work
> fine. At least OpenBSD didn't have a problem with that - you do need
> another IDE drive to boot from, though.
> 

Thanks for the useful info :) I will keep them in mind if I ever have to
pick a cheap sparc machine again!

-Alex