[geeks] Further info on Sol8 networking problem

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Fri, Mar 22, 2002 at 10:14:32AM -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:

>   That's pretty silly of them.  The *only* OS/machine combo that I'm
> willing to install in an unattended situation is NetBSD/sparc...alpha
> in a few cases, but mostly sparc.

Yes well, I can't really argue with them about this till July at this point.
Mid March through June are the busy time for Mom, and I keep trying to tell 
her never to make changes to her production system in the middle of this time,
and so now that I want to make a change to a system she depends on, she is
holding what I said against me.  Never mind that the current solution offers
no diagnostic tools or automation tools.  Verizon seems to just drop the 
connection every so often (once a day or more) and the Winpoet is too stupid
to recognize this, so someone has to go to the basement and reset the 
connection manually.  

They say that keeping these things running is what I do in exchange for not
paying rent.  Fine.  I can't really afford rent at this time anyway (virtually
all money goes to car and school).  It just adds incentive to graduate ASAP.
 
>   If I'm willing to stake my professional reputation (and indeed, my
> income) on it, I think your parents probably can.  An SS2 would do
> fine for this task...I've got machines of this sort, in this role,
> with uptimes in excess of two years.

Yes, well convincing them of that isn't easy.  They think it would be handy
to have a dedicated print/file server in their office, but they don't because
they don't want linux (or NetBSD), and don't have room in that office to set
up another moniter, keyboard, etc.  Sigh.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd