[rescue] SMP on intel wasteful?

[Monty Walls]

On 24 Jun 2002 16:27:37 -0400
Chris Hedemark <chris at yonderway.com> wrote:
[snip]
> On Mon, 2002-06-24 at 15:33, Michael Schiller wrote:
> 
> > Ok, it's real simple. Real machines are designed to last a LONG time. As an
> > example, My mother had a Compaq PC that she bought a few years back, and it came
> > with a 2 gig HD. after less than a year and a half the motherboard died, so they
> > ended up replacing the whole machine, because the new mb wouldn't work with the
> > old drive / memory, etc.
> 
> Sure, you're lucky to get 2 or 3 years out of the crap that is being
> pushed to the bottom end consumer in the PC market.  Even the big guys
> like Compaq, Dell, etc. are peddling cheap wares to the masses.  I got
> burned on something like that once (once) around 1994 buying an Acer
> box.  Every machine I've owned since then has been home rolled.
> 
> Yes, you're right, reliability of the bottom end stuff is a major issue
> in the PC world and I make no excuse for it.
> 

When you can, always buy quality parts, generally big name box pushers use
cheap parts/junk, so buying from Dell or similar is not the right way to
buy personal boxes.  Though their server grade stuff is much better.  

My personal pc is something of a hardware abortion because of that. 
(It's sad when many of your pc parts will be recognized by an Ultra30).

> > When it comes to 'real' hardware, I have a Sun Sparcstation LX running as one of
> > my nameservers. It's currently running Solaris 8, but soon I will upgrade it to
> > Solaris 9. The LX has a 50mhz microsparc CPU in it, approximately equivalent to
> > a 486/66.
> 
> Hmmm I had heard that Solaris 9 wouldn't run on anything earlier than a
> sun4u but haven't actually tried the betas yet.
>

Sun4m
 
> Your use of a Sparcstation LX for running DNS services is exactly what I
> endorsed the platform for.  DNS doesn't need to be speedy, but it needs
> to be darned near 100% reliable.  And I fully endorse the use of low end
> Sun boxen for that use.
> 
> > Tell me, how many 486/66 machines can run the current version of the OS they
> > were originally designed for? Any?
> 
> I would argue though that the 486 processor was not designed for a
> specific OS.  Intel has a track record of supporting the development of
> multiple OS's for its architecture.  Of course Linux was just a dorm
> room experiment back when 486 was king of the desktop, but SCO was still
> one of the OS's Intel was helping out back then, and the latest version
> will still run on a 486/66.
> 

God I hated SCO.  Anyone really like symlinks for all the important files....

[snip
-- 
-Monty Walls (mwalls at castor.oktax.state.ok.us)
-	MIS, Oklahoma Tax Commission
-
- My opinions are my own, my employer knows nothing about it.