[SunRescue] SS2 usefulness (waz: 5 major manufacturers?)

[DaveMcGuiremcguire at neurotica.com]

On September 27, Stou Sandalski wrote:
> Yea I see your point... is the SS2 fast enough to run those services? I have
> one... and when I first got it, it had SunOS 4.1.1, then I killed that and
> tried to put OpenBSD on it... one thing I noticed was that the SS2 was
> sooooo slow, surely something must be wrong with it... I mean when you type
> ls it would print out one line at a time like one of them old skool
> hollywood representations of a military super comptuer.... it would take
> like 3 - 5 minutes to fill the screen with the directory listing... and when
> it was downloading the OpenBSD files from one of my other systems (on a 10BT
> net), it was like downloading slower then a modem... is this really how
> these machines run or is it just me? My orignal intent was to make it a
> telnet server for my friends to play with remotely... but would it be fast
> enough for that?

  It's definitely just you.  It sounds to me like you're running the
system in "console mode" which uses ROM routines to [very slowly] draw
and scroll characters into the framebuffer.  It's slower than pissing
tar.  But that's ok, because that mode is only intended to be used
during booting or heavy maintenance.  The bottleneck is in blitting
the character bitmaps into the framebuffer from the ROM without using
any of the framebuffer's [possible] acceleration features...it's
definitely not representative of the performance of the machine as a
whole.

  If you telnet into the machine, or run X on it and start up a xterm,
it will be worlds faster.  As long as it has enough memory, that is.

  Several years ago, the SS2 was a very viable desktop workstation.
They're still capable of the same work today as they were back then.
Just because faster systems exist doesn't mean the SS2 has somehow
magically gotten slower.

  You state that you wanted to put up a telnet server for friends to
play with...The SS2 (or an even lower-end machine) will do just fine
for that.  Unless you're running heavy encryption or something like
that, the bottleneck will *always* be your connectivity.

  Put it up and give it a shot...you won't be disappointed.


                  -Dave McGuire