[Gllug] Recommended distro

[Christian Smith]

On Mon, 13 Dec 2004, Richard Jones wrote:

>On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 05:14:06PM +0000, Christian Smith wrote:
>> But for single point of failure servers? If fast enough is fast enough, go
>> for the most reliable solution. Price/performance means nothing if support
>> costs of failed hardware dwarf initial purchase cost (likely). When a
>> whole department relies on a single server, that price/performance will be
>> for nothing if the whole department is twiddling it's thumbs waiting for
>> it to be fixed all afternoon.
>
>True enough, but is Sun kit even that much more reliable?  I've seen
>lots of broken Sun boxes, lots of broken PCs, lots of broken
>DEC/Compaq boxes ...  (This is not meant to be a scientific survey!)


As the SUN desktops have approached PCs in price (starting with the
Ultra5/10) I don't think they've been particularly impressive. Problems
with the HD (really cheap IDE disks) seem to be the main problem.
Anecdotally, I'm not aware of a sun server dieing at our place (not a
massive sample size, mind) yet we've had several PC based servers die. And
the HP boxes would take an earthquake to kill them.

And my 10+ year old SUN IPX is still going strong at
www.theghetto.org.uk[*], admittedly with no content:)

>
>Any major PC company will offer you high-level support, and if you
>don't want to pay for that, then just spec high quality PC components,
>and if necessary keep a spare system.  You'll still save money.


A friend had to send broken hot swap disks back to Dell before
replacements would be shipped. The company might have just had a really
cheap support contract, but that doesn't sound like good support.

Even keeping a spare system is probably easier with SUN servers, as the
NVRAM is swappable between boxes, taking configuration with them (think of
hostid locked licenses, for example.)

Of course, I could just be talking out of my arse, I'm a developer and not
a sys-admin, after all. But from what I've seen, I'd rather admin
otherwise identical SUN boxes than PC boxes any day.


>
>Rich.
>

Christian

[*] He says quickly checking security:) Please be gentle.

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