[Gllug] Sun hardware/firewall memory

[Ian Norton-Badrul]

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Adrian McMenamin wrote:
| I suppose this is marginally off topic, but...something to ponder.
|
| The Sparcstation 20 box I bought a few weeks ago for a fiver doesn't
| appear to do much better in published benchmarks than a simple pre-mmx
| pentium system that would have cost 50 - 75% less than the sparc when it
| was manufactured.
|
| So, what is so great about the Sparc that it cost so much more? To be
| honest my impression is that it is a better box than, say the Pentium
| 166 that is my firewall (which probably gets better benchmarks), but
| then it does have 192 MB as opposed to the 48 MB on the firewall.
|
| Then, second query: thanks to the end of lifing of a pentium 120 I can
| upgrade the firewall/router to 64 MB. Is it worth the hassle?
|
| The firewall/router does nothing these days, except, err route or not
| route. It doesn't use 48MB, so what do I get out of 64MB

Sparcs have been _the_ most reliable linux machines I have ever had, I
(until very recently) had a sparc 5 that was doing a very very good job
hosting a very popular irc server root hub (for about 2 years, 1yr
uptime), (it was replaced by a 2GHz intel box).

I have also found that they are very very quiet, and that they have much
better provision for headless maintiance than an average ageing desktop
p166, (serial console right from first power on) [that said I do have a
sparc lx that refuses to boot without a mouse]

Apart from that there is a small amount of cool from using an
alternative architecture. :-)

Ian
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