[rescue] FDDI card

[James Sharp]

> > On February 25, Brian Hechinger wrote:
> > > > anymore, the sent me one of their nice "server" cards, with a bunch of
> > > > neat tricks built in.  (PeeCee Wake on Lan, that sort of thing)
> > >
> > > Wake on Lan on a server?  that just seems rather silly to me.
> >
> >   A PeeCee as a server seems pretty silly in the first place.
>
> why?

You mean I have to explain myself instead of just mindlessly bashing
things?  Darn it.  Okay...here goes.

They're just not designed for it.

1) There's always going to be a bottleneck in network IO as every byte
that comes into the system has to be flipped around.  PC byteorder !=
network byte order.

2) They don't handle loads very gracefully.  Sure, you can sort of make up
for this by getting the latest & greatest 340982304983Thz processor...they
can do 1 thing REALLY fast, but when you start making them task swap &
context switch, they fall on their face.

3) That whole keyboard & monitor thing.  Sun/Alpha/SGI/etc machines all
have BUILT-IN serial consoles.  The closest thing you can get to a true
serial console on a PeeCee is the PC Weasel, but all that really does is
emulate the monitor & keyboard...turns it into a serial stream.

4) You can't standardize on anything for more than 2-3 months.  If you
order a Sun E450 today and one 9 months from now, they're going to be
almost identical...maybe a few board revision changes.  If you order a 1RU
PeeCee from $COMPANY today and get another one 9 months later, you're
going to end up with all sorts of new parts & pieces, new processors & new
motherboards (since the ones that were in the first box was discontinued
and nobody even acknowledges that they existed), fancy new SCSI
controllers, and probably some 3D whiz-bang superaccelerated video card.

5) Nothing pisses me off more than having a server fall off the network
because it was "idle" for more than 15 minutes and went to sleep because
of EnergyStar or whatever power conservation stuff there is because I
forgot to disable it (okay, so my Ultra 1 did the same thing...but that I
could change with Solaris...didn't have to go into the freakin BIOS
(which I couldn't have gotten to anyway...see serial console above))

I'm sure theres more reasons...