[lug] More Server Problems

[David L. Anselmi]

Nate Duehr wrote:
> [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.

The only caution to this is that if the box is several years old the 
drives may only have a 5 year design life.  So for reliability it's 
worth getting new drives I think (or at least factoring that into your 
recovery plans).

[...]
> 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.

But it's not Free[1].

> 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.

Yeah, Sun has some nice gizmos but I've grown attached to the easy 
incremental updates I can do with Debian testing.

  1. Admittedly being able to make Freedom a top criteria when choosing 
software (and not needing all Sun's gizmos for anything) is a luxury. 
So I admit, I'm really spoiled.

Dave