[rescue] Okay.. OS thoughts

[Bill Bradford]

I've got the old "ohno.mrbill.net" (main SunHELP server) back up and
halfway running here at the house.  Threw it in an old ATX case that
I had in the garage, with a 4.5gig IDE HD and an old IDE DVD-ROM (which
it actually boots Solaris off of, amazingly).

Its based on a Sun AXe (aka "Topdog") OEM board, which is a 300Mhz
USIIi CPU, 256K L2 cache.  Other than being an ATX formfactor,
using a PS/2 keyboard and mouse, and having a fixed (non-upgradable)
CPU, its pretty much identical to a later-rev U5/10 (4Mb video onboard).

Now, I'm looking at making this my "OS Testbed" machine.  It doesent
have enough disk space to dork around with Solaris9 on, so I'm thinking
of the following:

- OpenBSD (hrm, looks like U5/U10 support sucks)
- NetBSD (hrm.  *maybe*)
- Linux (Debian?  I cant find any other good available-on-CD ports for
  Sparc/Sparc64..)

Machine doesent have a floppy drive, and I dont really intend to put
one in.. Does NetBSD have anything like a software RAID and/or
logging filesyste/softupdates yet?  If so, I may throw a couple of
large IDE drives in this beast and make it the home fileserver..

(why not solaris?  I ran into data corruption issues with this 
 board, Solaris 8, and UFS logging - which was one of the reasons I
 replaced it with a newer, faster machine for the web pages and 
 mailing lists)

Opinions, anyone?

Bill

-- 
Bill Bradford
mrbill at mrbill.net
Austin, TX