On Thursday 17 July 2003 00:11, Keith Stenson wrote: > Hey all, > > I was just wondering if any of you guys have had any experience in using > old sun and HP boxes with Linux. I'm thinking of picking up one to act > as a test box to play about with but ultimately maybe using them as > samba servers etc? >
I find it hard to get excited about running Linux on peculiar architectures - I guess the only reasons to do it are: 1) you are getting old equipment for free (or just for pennies) 2) you really an enourmous fast new system and can't build a cluster 3) you want to foil the script kiddies (not a very good one) 4) you want to learn how to be a Sun/HP hardware engineer ...but I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any other reasons. My experience is mostly with HP boxes: Even the most trivial of spares can be ridiculously expensive (HP charge �100.00 for a 1.5m wide SCSI cable). Having said that, I recently is covered that 2nd hand prices have taken a major nosedive in the last 3 years. Hardware documentation can be tricky to find. They tend to be huge, noisy and use lots of power. Often weird too. I'd be very surprised if you can get more bang for your buck from HP/Sun compared to intel. They should be more reliable (particularly older systems) though, +you'll probably get good quality SCSI disks. Linux on PA-Risc is becoming more mainstream / usable, and Sparc support has been around for a long time. I'd stick with Intel, or buy an iMac if you want to be peculiar. Colin _______________________________________________ Scottish mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/scottish
