Re: Debian on Sun box any advantage?

[Norbert Gerhards <n.gerhards@ib-gerhards.de>]

Hi everyone,

I'm webhosting for a bunch of customers and have Sun machines
since 1990.

I streamlined my hardware and OS zoo a while ago and end up now
with 5 Sun Ultra-2 with 2 x 300 MHz UltraSPARCS and 2 GB RAM each
and running debian 2.6.18-6-sparc64-smp. Harddisks are 36 GB
Seagates in RAID-1.

These machines serve about 60 websites and hundreds of users
easily and successfully. You set them up and forget...
Some show uptimes of > 500 days now; it would be more, had I
not hardware upgraded them.

All my management is done from my local PC via PuTTY Connection
Manager.

Compared to a Windows 2003 Server system I tested a while ago,
I would guess the admin time of my SPARC systems is less than
10% of the time I had to spend on the Windows OS.

So why not make use of these extremely reliable Sun H/W with
an even reliable OS debian?  :-)

Hope this will help some interested people over here,

Norbert

Joseph Simantov schrieb:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I have been following this interesting exchange, and I believe we must, first, agree on what are we finally trying to achieve. 
>
> Is our concern to manage by all means to make a clean Debian installation on SPARCs, or are we expecting to be able to put this combination to do something useful for the average user. 
>
> I believe we'll all agree that when it comes to reliability, SPARCs have a long established reputation. You just have to boot once a SPARC server and then you practically forget its existence...
>
> The main problems appear when SPARCs must, for some reason, be used as workstations with Debian.
>
> Although a succesful installation on an older machine can be a rewarding experience, we have to face reality and be aware that in the current industrial context, people are not interested to know how complex and difficult an installation was; all they want to know is if working on an older machine will help them do their job fast, or more reliably.
>
> Besides, at the current price level of new PCs, money-saving by keeping older machines is becoming irrelevant; it's mostly a question of principle, of not throwing away machines just because they happen not to be last-generation...
>
> I personnally find the Xorg issues with U5/U10 and Blades quite frustrating; could somebody among those who have managed to succesfully install (and work...) with a Blade100+/Debian, spend some time in writing a summary describing the procedure he followed? I'm sure all of us would highly appreciate such a contribution...
>
> And, in order not to appear grumpy, yes, I do believe in using Debian/Sparc!!
>
> Regards,
>
> Joseph
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Michelle Konzack <linux4michelle@tamay-dogan.net>
> To: debian-sparc@lists.debian.org
> Sent: Friday, October 24, 2008 9:03:17 PM
> Subject: Re: Debian on Sun box any advantage?
>
> Am 2008-10-22 13:18:26, schrieb John Bevins:
> > Hello Everyone,
> >
> > I don't know much about Sun boxes. What advantage, if any, is there to 
> > running Debian on a Sun box as opposed to a brand name x86 server?
> >
> > Regards,
> > John
>
> I use three Sun Blade with 32 CPU's and 64 GByte of memory with now  160
> hardrives attached as PostgreSQL server and it is faster then the hell.
>
> Also I have Sun Storage Servers with plenty of drives.
>
> They have never failed and since Sun has offered me Solaris OR  Linux  I
> with the same support I have choosen Linux...
>
> There is not a singel thing, which is NOT working, including Hotswaping
> of CPU's or memory...
>
> OK, this are not computers for the pocket and cost money, but the SPARC
> CPU's run more reliable as Intel (Itanium) or AMD (Opteron) CPU's.
>
> Thanks, Greetings and nice Day/Evening
>     Michelle Konzack
>     Systemadministrator
>     24V Electronic Engineer
>     Tamay Dogan Network
>     Debian GNU/Linux Consultant