[SunRescue] Cheap big iron

[Mike Meredith]

Hi

On Thursday 05 April 2001 22:36, you wrote:
> I don't think anything but Dynix will run on it.  Looking around, G++
> runs on it.  The seller said two harddrives.  Based on when these
> machines were out, I'm guessing that they would be .5g or 1g drives. 

Depends on how much after sales tinkering was done, and these were the 
sorts of machines that had plenty done after they were sold. I've still 
got (at work) a Sequent disk cannister with a 9Gbyte drive in it.

> Oracle runs on the thing.  Some conteporaries seem to be the Sparc2s

Yup. That's what ours used to do, before it was replaced with a couple 
of maxed out E450's.

> and SGI 4D machines, so I'm guessing that it might be 40mhz
> processors, but don't really know. And as the MIPS R8k demostrated,
> mhz says extremely little about speed. It might be equiv to a Sun1000
> with 5 SM31(??) modules (the 40mhz ones that original come witht the
> mazhine).

It may have had some additional CPU's added later --- certainly ours 
did. Ours ended up with a handful of 486's and a couple of pentium's. 
Yes the two we ran were Intel-based, but I'm not going to say that this 
beasty is. Ours were half-height cabinets, rather than full cabinets, 
and definitely had a different model number.

> Dynix is based on BSD4.2

Really ?!?

The version of Dynix we ran definitely liked to announce itself as 
SVR3, and definitely had that sort of flavour. It's possible that 
earlier versions were BSD-based though.

> > or are there any DYNIX die-hards out there
> > who would actually run DYNIX?

Not a chance. I still wake up in a sweat after a nasty dream about 
those beasties. By the time I was involved, they were on their last 
legs and needed hardware fixing every couple of months. And they ran 
the sort of application that caused senior management to peer over my 
shoulder every time they broke :(