[lug] More Server Problems

[Nate Duehr]

[snipped conversation about how to do servers... one big box, vs. lots 
of little boxes...]

Slightly OT, but you *could* run Linux on them... Ever considered using 
something like a Sun E420R?

Seen 'em going on eBay lately for around $300+shipping for the 
4-processor 400 MHz versions with 4GB of RAM.

That's a lot of server horsepower for very little money.  400 MHz in the 
UltraSparc world doesn't really equate well with the PC server (Opteron) 
world... but the I/O speeds available on most Sun boxes can sometimes 
make a Sun server running at 1/3 the "speed" of something in the PC 
server world, actually perform better in how much data it can crunch out 
to the users.

Last time I did it, Linux support for this type of hardware was good... 
especially if you're a Debian (or derivatives) fan.

Some pain during initial setup to get some odd keymapping things figured 
out, back when I used a Sun box running Linux regularly... but these 
boxes ran perfectly (and natively 64-bit) under Linux years ago... 
stability is probably not much of a problem, even today.  Similar to 
running Linux on Apple hardware -- the hardware's more standardized, 
therefore problems caused by non-standard hardware in other platform 
types, just don't exist.

If you go the eBay route, find one with rack rails, or be prepared to 
set it on a sturdy shelf, they're not lightweights.  And the rails are 
expensive.

(In that same regard, the boxes have sturdy hardware, massive numbers of 
fans (noisy as hell!), and hardware monitoring.  The equivalently-priced 
PC-server can't even touch most of the additional "server quality" 
additions they have.  If they have an RSE card in them, that card can be 
used for remote reboots, monitoring, etc... when PC server manufacturers 
  started touting "lights-out" management, they were already 3 years 
behind... the real server world.)

Of course, you can also run Solaris 9 or 10 on it, and still have all 
the joy of a decent version of gcc, and built just about anything any 
server would need... and you can play with things like Sun's "zones" for 
creating snapshots, etc... apache, bash, all the various open-source 
software almost always has a Sun port done already.

Sun's OS keeps moving forward, and is a hell of a lot more stable than 
the equivalent Linux packages doing the same types of disk 
virtualization, etc... but no one's looking.

Makes their prices low enough to really want to pick up a few of them 
for my server applications right now.  :-)

If you do run Solaris, patching it for security issues is still a bit of 
a pain in the ass, but if the box has Net connectivity, Sun has better 
tools than in the past.  They're still utterly unintelligent, compared 
to something like apt, but getting better.

Nate