[rescue] The time has come, the walrus said

[Brian Howe]

I like OpenBSD. I've run it on an SS20 almost exactly like you described.
It's clean, small and more importantly for a "school system" it's secure.
you don't have to install a GUI, but if you choose try out
Blackbox/Fluxbox/Openbox. They require very little overhead and are simple
to configure.

For my money, I'd run snort and nagios. That way you could connect to the
nagios display from another system relieving yourself of the need to install
a GUI on the SS20.

my$.02 fwiw.

On 4/22/05, Mike Parson <mparson at bl.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Apr 22, 2005 at 09:46:05AM -0500, Wes Will wrote:
> > to talk of many things; Of sailing ships and sealing wax, and I have not
> > uncovered any of the token ring cd's, but I've got a student worker and
> > another sysadmin looking for me as well. You are not forgotten, I just
> > have nothing to give you yet. Sorry, John Schmidt. I'm still trying to
> > find them in the renovated library nightmare.
> >
> > On to new business for me. What would be my best choice for an operating
> > system, please discuss it amongst the group, for a SparcStation20. I
> have
> > several 4-gig drives available, the one internal and two more in
> external
> > boxen, so storage isn't an issue. The beast has one sm81 processor, and
> > only 64 megs of RAM. I don't have any bux for adding memory, but I think
> I
> > have another SuperSPARC CPU board around, it would be an sm71.
> (Secondary
> > question, would the 71 and the 81 do any good together? Would it be
> worth
> > the hassle? Would there be any hassle?)
>
> My choice for an OS would be NetBSD. Freely available, easily tuned to
> your needs, pkgsrc makes getting the packages you need easy enough. And
> since 2.0, NetBSD/sparc supports SMP.
>
> As far as mixing your SM81 and SM71 processors, there have been rumors
> of people doing this under Solaris, but I've never personally seen it
> happen.
>
> > What O/S is of course dependent upon function, and this is supposed to
> be a
> > network monitor box hooked into our campus ethernet. It will have to be
> > something open-source (RRDTools? something like that rings a bell), to
> keep
> > the Cisco managed switches listed and SNMP'd, or at the very least their
> > status checked.
>
> rrdtool, mrtg, snort, etc, all available.
>
> > There is of course no campus budget money for this. Any expenses will
> have
> > to come out of my hide, and the skin's pretty thin these days.
> >
> > I have this SS20, salvaged/scavenged, and a box of oddball parts to go
> with
> > it. The campus network is a free-for-all out there, and I need to see
> > what's going on. I've used this box before, running Aurora Linux and
> > BigBrother to do a pretty decent job of watching some servers, but I'd
> like
> > opinions on the best choice for this function. I think it could do a
> > decent job, and I want to put this nice old Sparc back in service if it
> can
> > handle what I need.
>
> BB is good for having a look and reporting on what it sees, if you
> want it to take action on events, you're better of with something like
> Nagios.
>
> --
> Michael Parson
> mparson at bl.org
> _______________________________________________
> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
>



--
Brian Howe
bwhowe_at_gmail_dot_com
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