[rescue] Ultra 5 OS

[Simon Fryer]

G'Day,

On 15 April 2010 19:42, William Barnett-Lewis <wlewisiii at gmail.com> wrote:
> Last winter I rescued an Ultra 5 here in town. It's a 333mhz w/ 512mb
> & 2 45 gb EIDE disks on board. I dug out my last Type 4 keyboard &
> optical mouse & it comes up to the OK prompt just fine.
>
> So now the question becomes which OS for this older (older says the
> guy who used to just be happy with an IPX w/ 'Weitek Power Up' on
> board...) system?

[...]

My UltraSPArc 5 runs OpenBSD (an old version and needs to be
upgraded). I run a serial console so I can not comment about frame
buffer support but this is normally more an Xorg thing rather than a
specific OS issue.

My setup boots from compact flash and does the routing, NAT, VPN end
point and firewalling for my home network. The CF is mounted read only
and there are memory file systems for log files. This allows it to be
turned off at night without a shutdown.

The Ultra5 does have some speed issues with OpenBSD. OpenBSD seems to
stumble a bit if one of the ethernet interfaces has a lot of traffic
(two fast machines transferring large amounts of data using rsync) on
the same ethernet segment.

Otherwise, very reliable.

Simon

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Well, an engineer is not concerned with the truth; that is left to
philosophers and theologians: the prime concern of an engineer is
the utility of the final product."
Lectures on the Electrical Properties of Materials, L.Solymar, D.Walsh