[rescue] SMP on intel wasteful?

[Chris Hedemark]

On Mon, 2002-06-24 at 13:28, Bill Bradford wrote:

> Didnt Chris say he had a large number of boxes (Intel) at his house?

Some I paid for, some I got for free.  Most of them are for selling to
buy more esoteric toys.  The real work gets done on a Duron though.

> I know why!  Its so when one dies, he has a spare! 8-)

Oh absolutely.  The bulk of these machines are IBM PC330 desktop boxes. 
Like most IBM hardware, it was overbuilt so we really haven't had much
problem with failures, even on these 8+ year old boxes that were clogged
with dust.  But some of the machines were halfway plundered for the
parts inside, so I do use those to consolidate and build complete
systems.

I've found them to be perfect for firewalling purposes.  Every single
one of them has demonstrated better hardware resilience than the Sun
E220, E250, E420 and E450 workgroup servers I have had experience with. 
I'm not saying that they should replace such a box, but I am saying that
there are some very well made PC's out there, and IBM was building them
8 years ago when these machines were new.