[Gllug] Sun hardware/firewall memory

[John Edwards]

On Mon, Dec 20, 2004 at 08:38:38PM +0000, 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.

It could have cost a lot more than that. Most Sparcstations 20 were about 
$10,000 when they were first introduced 1994 ?), machines with dual CPU or 
more RAM could be over double that. Of course the prices came down with 
time, educational discounts, trade in offers.

I would guess that average PC prices were still about $1,500 at that 
time. I bought my first PC (100MHz Pentium) in late 1995 for about 600 
UKP, though I remember it as a very poor no-name clone machine.


> 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.

In terms of raw CPU power then your Pentium will probably come out ahead 
for a standard SS20 (eg 50Mhz, no L2 cache). But the Sun had three main 
areas of advantage:


1) Good engineering. The hard drives are SCA, so there is no fiddling 
with jumpers or cables, and are housed in caddies that are easily 
released with a handle. Compare with the usual sharp blood-sucking 
metal edges of a typical PC of that era.

Also most SPARCstation are still capable of running after ten years, 
the most common faults being flat NVRAM battery or a damaged hard 
drive.


2) Expandablity. Up to 4 CPUs on a Sparcstation 20, 8 memory slots 
compared to the typical PC's two pairs, and onboard SCSI.


3) Single hardware and software vendor. It runs an OS that was 
designed for the system, so you have one phone number to call when 
things go wrong instead of playing pass the support call between 
PC, device & OS vendors. Doesn't always work well in practise but 
some people like that.

Of course that means that the cost of expansion or spare parts get 
very expensive.


Really it's not a desktop PC and was not designed to do desktop PC 
things, such as having a parallel port for a printer. It was a Unix 
workstation from the days when PCs ran Windows 3.11, were lucky if 
they ran for a full day without a crash, and were not thought of 
by some as real computers.

Proper multitasking 32bit operating systems such as NT4, Linux and 
BSD (once the AT&T case was settled) along with advances in Intel 
CPUs changed all that.

Starting with the Ultra 5, Sun started to use more and more PC 
components in their low end systems until now they use AMD Opterons 
CPUs.


> 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

If it is only doing iptables filtering (as I assume you mean) then 
no. If it is also running something like snort or a proxy then yes. 

Running "top" and then pressing "Shift-M" will show processes sorted 
by memory usage.


ps. In the office is a fair amount of SPARCstation 5 and 20 stuff 
that is not used and due for retirement. Aside from the common bits 
there are differential SCSI, 10/100 ethernet and some completely 
unknown (could be GBIC or IEE488 ?) sbus cards.

Collection is in Chiswick, West London (near BR station). If anyone 
is interested email me for details, let me know why you want them, 
and I'll check if they are available.


-- 
#---------------------------------------------------------#
|       John Edwards    Email: John.Edwards at uk.com        |
|                                                         |
| A. Because it breaks the logical sequence of discussion |
| Q. Why is top posting bad ?                             |
#---------------------------------------------------------#
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