Re: Architeture Choose
On Sun, Nov 07, 2010 at 12:11:51AM -0400, Nick Holland wrote: and a U5 at work that has been running an app for probably the last ten years with probably less than five hours total downtime (original disk. I'm scared). In that case you were lucky to have a good version of the motherboard... There is at least one revision where the capacitors go bad - mostly those buffering the CPU, causing the machine to become unstable. Of the 3 U5/U10 I've seen with that revision, 2 were already bad... Cheerio, Thomas -- - Thomas Ribbrockhttp://www.ribbrock.org/ You have to live on the edge of reality - to make your dreams come true!
Re: Architeture Choose
However, you can add one of these for ~30USD: sili0 at pci3 dev 1 function 0 CMD Technology SiI3124 SATA rev 0x02: apic 4 int 1 (irq 5) scsibus1 at sili0: 4 targets And an external drive(s) Thanks for the tip (yet another device I didn't know existed). The rackmount hard drive enclosures I googled cost more than the system in question. I guess I'll have to MacGyver something to keep my dirves from sliding all over the place, unless you have another piece of hardware up your sleeve. all real sun amd64/i386 gear i had my hands on over the previous years was horrible. and that is mostly due to the management processors being so incredibly bad. I'm very ignorant, as you can tell, about technical computing. I thought that a good system = good OS + good CPU + robust components. I mean to say that although the functional design of each component (say RAM, motherboard, etc) makes a difference, I just assumed that there's not a huge amount of variation in performance of these components, just in quality (endurance). Nobody needs to bother addressing this statement, suffice it to say that one can know more than all the people around him about something, and still know almost next to nothing about the subject :) Thank you all for the insightful discussion. -Scott
Architeture Choose
as an aside. anyone know where you can purchase a Portwell CAM-0100 in NA? diana
Re: Architeture Choose
On Thu, 11 Nov 2010 12:09:19 -0700 (MST) Diana Eichert deich...@wrench.com wrote: as an aside. anyone know where you can purchase a Portwell CAM-0100 in NA? diana Diana, You might want to give Portwell (in the US) a call: 1-510-403-3399 jcr
Re: Architeture Choose
On 2010-11-09, Jeremy Chase jeremych...@gmail.com wrote: I've looked into v20z's, but was turned off by the cost of a replacement power supply. A new one is roughly 200 USD. A spare v20z probably costs less than that Or does the v20z accept a standard 1U power supply? There's no such thing
Re: Architeture Choose
On Wed, 10 Nov 2010, Stuart Henderson wrote: On 2010-11-09, Jeremy Chase jeremych...@gmail.com wrote: I've looked into v20z's, but was turned off by the cost of a replacement power supply. A new one is roughly 200 USD. A spare v20z probably costs less than that refurbed v20z, US$120 shipped complete server with 2GB memory and 73GB HD damn, would make a great VoIP server.
Re: Architeture Choose
I just saw the v20z 4.8 dmesg on ajacoutot@ webpage and noticed he was running i386 instead of 64-bit. Curious if that is just a preference on his part or an issue with running 64-bit O/S on the box. g.day diana
Re: Architeture Choose
On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 3:09 PM, Diana Eichert deich...@wrench.com wrote: I just saw the v20z 4.8 dmesg on ajacoutot@ webpage and noticed he was running i386 instead of 64-bit. Curious if that is just a preference on his part or an issue with running 64-bit O/S on the box. I'm running amd64 on 7 v20z hosts without issues. Landry
Re: Architeture Choose
On Wed, 10 Nov 2010, Landry Breuil wrote: I'm running amd64 on 7 v20z hosts without issues. Landry thanks for the report I'd forgotten these were basically Newisys systems. We had several racks full of the Newisys Opteron servers before they were offically released to the public. Used them for work related to Red Storm. g.day
Re: Architeture Choose
Great discussion... I have two deal option: A) Sun V100 - USD$ 350,00 - *Type* Sun UltraSPARC IIi 650.0 MHz - *Cache Per Processor* 512 KB - *Installed Size* 2.0 GB - *Hard Drive* 2.0 x 160.0 GB - Standard - EIDE - 7200.0 rpm B) Sun v20z - USD$ 260,00 Opteron 2x248 2Gb Ram 1x73Gb SCSI 2xGb-LAN Thanks again, and sorry for my Sun's lag of knowledgement... []'s On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 11:37 AM, Diana Eichert deich...@wrench.com wrote: On Wed, 10 Nov 2010, Landry Breuil wrote: I'm running amd64 on 7 v20z hosts without issues. Landry thanks for the report I'd forgotten these were basically Newisys systems. We had several racks full of the Newisys Opteron servers before they were offically released to the public. Used them for work related to Red Storm. g.day
Re: Architeture Choose
On 11/10/2010 09:09 AM, Diana Eichert wrote: I just saw the v20z 4.8 dmesg on ajacoutot@ webpage and noticed he was running i386 instead of 64-bit. Curious if that is just a preference on his part or an issue with running 64-bit O/S on the box. g.day diana I've had a lot of problems with the amd64 kernel, mostly on HP DL3xx systems. Very difficult to track down and 100% remediable by moving to i386. -- Joe McDonagh AIM: YoosingYoonickz IRC: joe-mac on freenode When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
Re: Architeture Choose
Thank you all for humoring this caveman's ponderings. I missed one glaring detail about the V20z; SCSI drives ($$). I've got about 800GB of data to serve (very infrequent access; mostly just to stream One Piece episodes to my TV on the weekends, so I figured form factor could take priority over a system being tuned for such a job). still, your input has been very helpful, and I may consider one or two of these for other uses (the noise is something I'm prepared to deal with, but thanks for the advice Stuart). -Scott On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 7:45 AM, Joe McDonagh joseph.e.mcdon...@gmail.com wrote: On 11/10/2010 09:09 AM, Diana Eichert wrote: I just saw the v20z 4.8 dmesg on ajacoutot@ webpage and noticed he was running i386 instead of 64-bit. Curious if that is just a preference on his part or an issue with running 64-bit O/S on the box. g.day diana I've had a lot of problems with the amd64 kernel, mostly on HP DL3xx systems. Very difficult to track down and 100% remediable by moving to i386. -- Joe McDonagh AIM: YoosingYoonickz IRC: joe-mac on freenode When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
Re: Architeture Choose
On Wed, 10 Nov 2010 10:45:15 -0500 Joe McDonagh joseph.e.mcdon...@gmail.com wrote: On 11/10/2010 09:09 AM, Diana Eichert wrote: I just saw the v20z 4.8 dmesg on ajacoutot@ webpage and noticed he was running i386 instead of 64-bit. Curious if that is just a preference on his part or an issue with running 64-bit O/S on the box. g.day diana I've had a lot of problems with the amd64 kernel, mostly on HP DL3xx systems. Very difficult to track down and 100% remediable by moving to i386. It's a shame considering it's a more secure cpu stack, but that's just life. Is there certain hardware that it works flawlessly and as well as i386 on?
Re: Architeture Choose
On 11/10/2010 12:39 PM, Kevin Chadwick wrote: On Wed, 10 Nov 2010 10:45:15 -0500 Joe McDonaghjoseph.e.mcdon...@gmail.com wrote: On 11/10/2010 09:09 AM, Diana Eichert wrote: I just saw the v20z 4.8 dmesg on ajacoutot@ webpage and noticed he was running i386 instead of 64-bit. Curious if that is just a preference on his part or an issue with running 64-bit O/S on the box. g.day diana I've had a lot of problems with the amd64 kernel, mostly on HP DL3xx systems. Very difficult to track down and 100% remediable by moving to i386. It's a shame considering it's a more secure cpu stack, but that's just life. Is there certain hardware that it works flawlessly and as well as i386 on? No clue, however in talks with several developers I was told the hard locks I was experiencing aren't exactly 'rare', and have gotten worse over time. -- Joe McDonagh AIM: YoosingYoonickz IRC: joe-mac on freenode When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
Re: Architeture Choose
* Scott Stanley amorphous.yet@gmail.com [2010-11-09 16:58]: I've heard a lot of praise for Sparc gear on this thread. Do many of you have much experience with Sun's amd gear? avoid at all cost Anyway, I was considering buying a Sun Fire V20z (amd) as a home server, and would like to hear about any good or bad experiences with Sun+AMD (googling yields only media hype and performance reviews, but not real world stuff). the v20z is not really sun, that is newisys. might actually be usable. all real sun amd64/i386 gear i had my hands on over the previous years was horrible. and that is mostly due to the management processors being so incredibly bad. and you can't even turn it off on at least some systems. -- Henning Brauer, h...@bsws.de, henn...@openbsd.org BS Web Services, http://bsws.de Full-Service ISP - Secure Hosting, Mail and DNS Services Dedicated Servers, Rootservers, Application Hosting
Re: Architeture Choose
On Wed, 2010-11-10 at 23:47 +0100, Henning Brauer wrote: * Scott Stanley amorphous.yet@gmail.com [2010-11-09 16:58]: I've heard a lot of praise for Sparc gear on this thread. Do many of you have much experience with Sun's amd gear? avoid at all cost Anyway, I was considering buying a Sun Fire V20z (amd) as a home server, and would like to hear about any good or bad experiences with Sun+AMD (googling yields only media hype and performance reviews, but not real world stuff). the v20z is not really sun, that is newisys. might actually be usable. all real sun amd64/i386 gear i had my hands on over the previous years was horrible. and that is mostly due to the management processors being so incredibly bad. and you can't even turn it off on at least some systems. Unfortunately on the latest batch I've worked with I have to concur. I have about 150 SunFire X4400 and X2100 series system (they use Xenon not AMD, at least on the 4400) and they just plan suck. Fan indicator/PS failure lights on all the time and at least one memory problem on almost every system. I've come to the conclusion that most of these problems are with the embedded Linux service processor screwing up and reporting an error that may or may no exist. On top of that, I had about 20 of these service processors just flat out fail (entire logic board replacement). Everything on these systems depend on the SP working even the on off switch... Oh and to save money or something the cd drive in these things are attached to a USB bus and it doesn't appear to be v2.0... slow as hell and the internal connector fails all the time. They are also subcontracted out to some other manufacturer for Sun... can't remember what one. Run far away from these systems.
Re: Architeture Choose
On 9 November 2010 04:44, Christopher Dukes pak...@pr.neotoma.org wrote: On Fri, 2010-11-05 at 14:30 -0400, Joe McDonagh wrote: If your Sun fails -- that's a big IF. It's approaching a possibility of 0 in my experience. If performance isn't an issue and stability is your chief goal, none of this hardware is as stable as a Sun. Not quite my experience. In 2001 I worked at a place with a lot of used Sun hardware courtesy of Fujitsu layoffs (Sparc 20s, Ultra 5s). Entirely too many fried ethernet ports on the sparc 20s. And it took too many iterations to find a sparc 20 that wouldn't crash and burn while building OpenBSD from source. A fidgety developer kicking an ultra 5 from a | orientation to a _ orientation would reliably destroy the power supply and harddrives. On the bright side, I could repair the ultra 5s with power supply and drives scavenged from eMachines with ALI motherboards with the wonderful DMA that shoved garbage into memory for every OS we tried on them. I thought the Micro Channel based RS/6Ks (Before the horrid SMP ones designed by Group Bull) were a bit more bullet proof, with the only dead hardware I'd experience being. 1) Rats pissing on the system boards, because the customer refused to keep the covers on their systems in manufacturing. 2) A ladybird beetle invasion. The RT PC was pretty reliable too. I had one manufactured in 1987 that was still trundling along in 2006 when I gave it away. Maybe I got lucky, but all my Sun gear works nicely. 10x U10's/U5's, a Blade 150, 2x Ultra 60's, 1x Ultra 80 and a Sun Fire V250. This includes a U10 with an exploded yellow diode and the Sun Fire V250 having been dropped (presumably in transit) causing the LOM card to rip off the plastic from one end of it's mate connector in the motherboard. Not knowing that, attempting to power it up caused smoke and a really bad feeling. I had to do some MacGyver'ing to fix that, but it's working fine. Shane
Re: Architeture Choose
I've heard a lot of praise for Sparc gear on this thread. Do many of you have much experience with Sun's amd gear? When using the I'm only referring to Sparc disclaimer, what's being implied here (because I know nobody's saying that hardware fails because of the CPU type, or am I wrong on that)? Is it that Sparc boxes are for mission critical apps, and so let's use only the best hardware? Anyway, I was considering buying a Sun Fire V20z (amd) as a home server, and would like to hear about any good or bad experiences with Sun+AMD (googling yields only media hype and performance reviews, but not real world stuff). -Scott On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 12:08 AM, SJP Lists sjp.li...@flashbsd.net wrote: On 9 November 2010 04:44, Christopher Dukes pak...@pr.neotoma.org wrote: On Fri, 2010-11-05 at 14:30 -0400, Joe McDonagh wrote: If your Sun fails -- that's a big IF. It's approaching a possibility of 0 in my experience. If performance isn't an issue and stability is your chief goal, none of this hardware is as stable as a Sun. Not quite my experience. In 2001 I worked at a place with a lot of used Sun hardware courtesy of Fujitsu layoffs (Sparc 20s, Ultra 5s). Entirely too many fried ethernet ports on the sparc 20s. And it took too many iterations to find a sparc 20 that wouldn't crash and burn while building OpenBSD from source. A fidgety developer kicking an ultra 5 from a | orientation to a _ orientation would reliably destroy the power supply and harddrives. On the bright side, I could repair the ultra 5s with power supply and drives scavenged from eMachines with ALI motherboards with the wonderful DMA that shoved garbage into memory for every OS we tried on them. I thought the Micro Channel based RS/6Ks (Before the horrid SMP ones designed by Group Bull) were a bit more bullet proof, with the only dead hardware I'd experience being. 1) Rats pissing on the system boards, because the customer refused to keep the covers on their systems in manufacturing. 2) A ladybird beetle invasion. The RT PC was pretty reliable too. I had one manufactured in 1987 that was still trundling along in 2006 when I gave it away. Maybe I got lucky, but all my Sun gear works nicely. 10x U10's/U5's, a Blade 150, 2x Ultra 60's, 1x Ultra 80 and a Sun Fire V250. This includes a U10 with an exploded yellow diode and the Sun Fire V250 having been dropped (presumably in transit) causing the LOM card to rip off the plastic from one end of it's mate connector in the motherboard. Not knowing that, attempting to power it up caused smoke and a really bad feeling. I had to do some MacGyver'ing to fix that, but it's working fine. Shane
Re: Architeture Choose
We have Sunfire Ultra 40's. I recommended those based on other people buying Sunfire Ultra 20's, V40z, etc in our place. All Ultra 40's run fine after 4 years and its now closer to 5 years. All of them blew their NVidia graphic cards. The other guys have plans to dump them as they follow 5 year refresh cycle (they might already have replaced them). We purchased new NVidia graphics and plan to go another 2-3 years. No other problems reported. Original keyboards, mouse, LCD screens. Whisper quiet. No dust inside that I see when I opened up for graphics replacement. Problem is now, you can't access Sun's website to download BIOS upgrades, which you would need to put new 4GB RAM into them instead of current 1GB or 2 GB sticks. HTH On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 9:55 AM, Scott Stanley amorphous.yet@gmail.com wrote: I've heard a lot of praise for Sparc gear on this thread. Do many of you have much experience with Sun's amd gear? When using the I'm only referring to Sparc disclaimer, what's being implied here (because I know nobody's saying that hardware fails because of the CPU type, or am I wrong on that)? Is it that Sparc boxes are for mission critical apps, and so let's use only the best hardware? Anyway, I was considering buying a Sun Fire V20z (amd) as a home server, and would like to hear about any good or bad experiences with Sun+AMD (googling yields only media hype and performance reviews, but not real world stuff). -Scott On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 12:08 AM, SJP Lists sjp.li...@flashbsd.net wrote: On 9 November 2010 04:44, Christopher Dukes pak...@pr.neotoma.org wrote: On Fri, 2010-11-05 at 14:30 -0400, Joe McDonagh wrote: If your Sun fails -- that's a big IF. It's approaching a possibility of 0 in my experience. If performance isn't an issue and stability is your chief goal, none of this hardware is as stable as a Sun. Not quite my experience. In 2001 I worked at a place with a lot of used Sun hardware courtesy of Fujitsu layoffs (Sparc 20s, Ultra 5s). Entirely too many fried ethernet ports on the sparc 20s. And it took too many iterations to find a sparc 20 that wouldn't crash and burn while building OpenBSD from source. A fidgety developer kicking an ultra 5 from a | orientation to a _ orientation would reliably destroy the power supply and harddrives. On the bright side, I could repair the ultra 5s with power supply and drives scavenged from eMachines with ALI motherboards with the wonderful DMA that shoved garbage into memory for every OS we tried on them. I thought the Micro Channel based RS/6Ks (Before the horrid SMP ones designed by Group Bull) were a bit more bullet proof, with the only dead hardware I'd experience being. 1) Rats pissing on the system boards, because the customer refused to keep the covers on their systems in manufacturing. 2) A ladybird beetle invasion. The RT PC was pretty reliable too. I had one manufactured in 1987 that was still trundling along in 2006 when I gave it away. Maybe I got lucky, but all my Sun gear works nicely. 10x U10's/U5's, a Blade 150, 2x Ultra 60's, 1x Ultra 80 and a Sun Fire V250. This includes a U10 with an exploded yellow diode and the Sun Fire V250 having been dropped (presumably in transit) causing the LOM card to rip off the plastic from one end of it's mate connector in the motherboard. Not knowing that, attempting to power it up caused smoke and a really bad feeling. I had to do some MacGyver'ing to fix that, but it's working fine. Shane
Re: Architeture Choose
On Tue, November 9, 2010 8:55 am, Scott Stanley wrote: I've heard a lot of praise for Sparc gear on this thread. Do many of you have much experience with Sun's amd gear? When using the I'm only referring to Sparc disclaimer, what's being implied here (because I know nobody's saying that hardware fails because of the CPU type, or am I wrong on that)? Is it that Sparc boxes are for mission critical apps, and so let's use only the best hardware? Anyway, I was considering buying a Sun Fire V20z (amd) as a home server, and would like to hear about any good or bad experiences with Sun+AMD (googling yields only media hype and performance reviews, but not real world stuff). I've been using a V20z as my mail/webserver for about 4-5 years now... absolutely fantastic OpenBSD platform... Everything supported and although the processors are dated they are awesome for my workloads. Wish I had about 4 more. Sorry for the lake of hard data...
Re: Architeture Choose
On 2010-11-09, Scott Stanley amorphous.yet@gmail.com wrote: I've heard a lot of praise for Sparc gear on this thread. Do many of you have much experience with Sun's amd gear? When using the I'm only referring to Sparc disclaimer, what's being implied here (because I know nobody's saying that hardware fails because of the CPU type, or am I wrong on that)? Is it that Sparc boxes are for mission critical apps, and so let's use only the best hardware? Anyway, I was considering buying a Sun Fire V20z (amd) as a home server, and would like to hear about any good or bad experiences with Sun+AMD (googling yields only media hype and performance reviews, but not real world stuff). v20z is a newisys machine not a sun machine. (someone else also oem'd them - maybe ibm?). the integrated disk mirroring works fine (mpi). it can be slightly fussy about PCI cards, mine refused to boot with an ami(4) connected. the management port is a separate embedded linux machine (with its own internal copy of conserver!) and has a dedicated nic, so it does work with OpenBSD on the main machine. if you want to use serial console iirc you'll need to disable console redirection in the bios and just set it up in the boot loader. disks are of course scsi and only 2, so not ideal if you want large volumes of storage. (make sure you get the trays, they are not the standard easily-obtainable sun spud brackets), they're useful machines and not bad - much better than the x2100 - but I'd hesitate to recommend almost any 1U rackmount box as a home server due to the noise levels. For home server use I think most people would be happier with something like an HP ML110 or one of the smaller Dell towers with an sas/sata raid card. OpenBSD 4.8-current (GENERIC.MP) #622: Sun Nov 7 14:57:37 MST 2010 dera...@amd64.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/amd64/compile/GENERIC.MP real mem = 4226220032 (4030MB) avail mem = 4099817472 (3909MB) mainbus0 at root bios0 at mainbus0: SMBIOS rev. 2.31 @ 0xefc10 (44 entries) bios0: vendor Phoenix Technologies Ltd. version V1.35.5.1 date 10/22/2008 bios0: Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V20z acpi0 at bios0: rev 2 acpi0: sleep states S0 S1 S5 acpi0: tables DSDT FACP HPET APIC SPCR SSDT SSDT SSDT SRAT acpi0: wakeup devices PCI0(S1) THOR(S1) USB0(S1) USB1(S1) Z000(S5) Z002(S5) acpitimer0 at acpi0: 3579545 Hz, 24 bits acpihpet0 at acpi0: 14318179 Hz acpimadt0 at acpi0 addr 0xfee0: PC-AT compat cpu0 at mainbus0: apid 0 (boot processor) cpu0: AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 252, 2592.99 MHz cpu0: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CFLUSH,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SSE3,NXE,MMXX,FFXSR,LONG,3DNOW2,3DNOW cpu0: 64KB 64b/line 2-way I-cache, 64KB 64b/line 2-way D-cache, 1MB 64b/line 16-way L2 cache cpu0: ITLB 32 4KB entries fully associative, 8 4MB entries fully associative cpu0: DTLB 32 4KB entries fully associative, 8 4MB entries fully associative cpu0: AMD erratum 89 present, BIOS upgrade may be required cpu0: apic clock running at 199MHz cpu1 at mainbus0: apid 1 (application processor) cpu1: AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 252, 2592.62 MHz cpu1: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CFLUSH,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SSE3,NXE,MMXX,FFXSR,LONG,3DNOW2,3DNOW cpu1: 64KB 64b/line 2-way I-cache, 64KB 64b/line 2-way D-cache, 1MB 64b/line 16-way L2 cache cpu1: ITLB 32 4KB entries fully associative, 8 4MB entries fully associative cpu1: DTLB 32 4KB entries fully associative, 8 4MB entries fully associative cpu1: AMD erratum 89 present, BIOS upgrade may be required ioapic0 at mainbus0: apid 2 pa 0xfec0, version 11, 24 pins ioapic1 at mainbus0: apid 3 pa 0xfd00, version 11, 4 pins ioapic2 at mainbus0: apid 4 pa 0xfd001000, version 11, 4 pins acpiprt0 at acpi0: bus 1 (THOR) acpiprt1 at acpi0: bus 2 (Z000) acpiprt2 at acpi0: bus 3 (Z002) acpicpu0 at acpi0: PSS acpicpu1 at acpi0: PSS acpibtn0 at acpi0: PWRB ipmi at mainbus0 not configured cpu0: Cool'n'Quiet K8 2592 MHz: speeds: 2600 2400 2200 2000 1800 1000 MHz pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0 ppb0 at pci0 dev 6 function 0 AMD 8111 PCI-PCI rev 0x07 pci1 at ppb0 bus 1 ohci0 at pci1 dev 0 function 0 AMD 8111 USB rev 0x0b: apic 2 int 19 (irq 11), version 1.0, legacy support ohci1 at pci1 dev 0 function 1 AMD 8111 USB rev 0x0b: apic 2 int 19 (irq 11), version 1.0, legacy support vga1 at pci1 dev 5 function 0 Trident Blade 3D rev 0x3a wsdisplay0 at vga1 mux 1: console (80x25, vt100 emulation) wsdisplay0: screen 1-5 added (80x25, vt100 emulation) usb0 at ohci0: USB revision 1.0 uhub0 at usb0 AMD OHCI root hub rev 1.00/1.00 addr 1 usb1 at ohci1: USB revision 1.0 uhub1 at usb1 AMD OHCI root hub rev 1.00/1.00 addr 1 amdpcib0 at pci0 dev 7 function 0 AMD 8111 LPC rev 0x05 pciide0 at pci0 dev 7 function 1 AMD 8111 IDE rev 0x03: DMA, channel 0 configured to compatibility, channel 1 configured to compatibility pciide0: channel 0 disabled (no drives) atapiscsi0 at pciide0 channel 1 drive 0 scsibus0 at atapiscsi0: 2 targets cd0 at scsibus0
Re: Architeture Choose
I've looked into v20z's, but was turned off by the cost of a replacement power supply. A new one is roughly 200 USD. Or does the v20z accept a standard 1U power supply? -- Jeremy Chase http://twitter.com/jeremychase On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 6:01 PM, Stuart Henderson s...@spacehopper.org wrote: On 2010-11-09, Scott Stanley amorphous.yet@gmail.com wrote: I've heard a lot of praise for Sparc gear on this thread. Do many of you have much experience with Sun's amd gear? When using the I'm only referring to Sparc disclaimer, what's being implied here (because I know nobody's saying that hardware fails because of the CPU type, or am I wrong on that)? Is it that Sparc boxes are for mission critical apps, and so let's use only the best hardware? Anyway, I was considering buying a Sun Fire V20z (amd) as a home server, and would like to hear about any good or bad experiences with Sun+AMD (googling yields only media hype and performance reviews, but not real world stuff). v20z is a newisys machine not a sun machine. (someone else also oem'd them - maybe ibm?). the integrated disk mirroring works fine (mpi). it can be slightly fussy about PCI cards, mine refused to boot with an ami(4) connected. the management port is a separate embedded linux machine (with its own internal copy of conserver!) and has a dedicated nic, so it does work with OpenBSD on the main machine. if you want to use serial console iirc you'll need to disable console redirection in the bios and just set it up in the boot loader. disks are of course scsi and only 2, so not ideal if you want large volumes of storage. (make sure you get the trays, they are not the standard easily-obtainable sun spud brackets), they're useful machines and not bad - much better than the x2100 - but I'd hesitate to recommend almost any 1U rackmount box as a home server due to the noise levels. For home server use I think most people would be happier with something like an HP ML110 or one of the smaller Dell towers with an sas/sata raid card. OpenBSD 4.8-current (GENERIC.MP) #622: Sun Nov B 7 14:57:37 MST 2010 B B dera...@amd64.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/amd64/compile/GENERIC.MP real mem = 4226220032 (4030MB) avail mem = 4099817472 (3909MB) mainbus0 at root bios0 at mainbus0: SMBIOS rev. 2.31 @ 0xefc10 (44 entries) bios0: vendor Phoenix Technologies Ltd. version V1.35.5.1 date 10/22/2008 bios0: Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V20z acpi0 at bios0: rev 2 acpi0: sleep states S0 S1 S5 acpi0: tables DSDT FACP HPET APIC SPCR SSDT SSDT SSDT SRAT acpi0: wakeup devices PCI0(S1) THOR(S1) USB0(S1) USB1(S1) Z000(S5) Z002(S5) acpitimer0 at acpi0: 3579545 Hz, 24 bits acpihpet0 at acpi0: 14318179 Hz acpimadt0 at acpi0 addr 0xfee0: PC-AT compat cpu0 at mainbus0: apid 0 (boot processor) cpu0: AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 252, 2592.99 MHz cpu0: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CFLUS H,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SSE3,NXE,MMXX,FFXSR,LONG,3DNOW2,3DNOW cpu0: 64KB 64b/line 2-way I-cache, 64KB 64b/line 2-way D-cache, 1MB 64b/line 16-way L2 cache cpu0: ITLB 32 4KB entries fully associative, 8 4MB entries fully associative cpu0: DTLB 32 4KB entries fully associative, 8 4MB entries fully associative cpu0: AMD erratum 89 present, BIOS upgrade may be required cpu0: apic clock running at 199MHz cpu1 at mainbus0: apid 1 (application processor) cpu1: AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 252, 2592.62 MHz cpu1: FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CFLUS H,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SSE3,NXE,MMXX,FFXSR,LONG,3DNOW2,3DNOW cpu1: 64KB 64b/line 2-way I-cache, 64KB 64b/line 2-way D-cache, 1MB 64b/line 16-way L2 cache cpu1: ITLB 32 4KB entries fully associative, 8 4MB entries fully associative cpu1: DTLB 32 4KB entries fully associative, 8 4MB entries fully associative cpu1: AMD erratum 89 present, BIOS upgrade may be required ioapic0 at mainbus0: apid 2 pa 0xfec0, version 11, 24 pins ioapic1 at mainbus0: apid 3 pa 0xfd00, version 11, 4 pins ioapic2 at mainbus0: apid 4 pa 0xfd001000, version 11, 4 pins acpiprt0 at acpi0: bus 1 (THOR) acpiprt1 at acpi0: bus 2 (Z000) acpiprt2 at acpi0: bus 3 (Z002) acpicpu0 at acpi0: PSS acpicpu1 at acpi0: PSS acpibtn0 at acpi0: PWRB ipmi at mainbus0 not configured cpu0: Cool'n'Quiet K8 2592 MHz: speeds: 2600 2400 2200 2000 1800 1000 MHz pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0 ppb0 at pci0 dev 6 function 0 AMD 8111 PCI-PCI rev 0x07 pci1 at ppb0 bus 1 ohci0 at pci1 dev 0 function 0 AMD 8111 USB rev 0x0b: apic 2 int 19 (irq 11), version 1.0, legacy support ohci1 at pci1 dev 0 function 1 AMD 8111 USB rev 0x0b: apic 2 int 19 (irq 11), version 1.0, legacy support vga1 at pci1 dev 5 function 0 Trident Blade 3D rev 0x3a wsdisplay0 at vga1 mux 1: console (80x25, vt100 emulation) wsdisplay0: screen 1-5 added (80x25, vt100 emulation) usb0 at ohci0: USB revision 1.0 uhub0 at usb0 AMD OHCI root hub rev 1.00/1.00 addr 1 usb1 at ohci1: USB revision 1.0 uhub1 at usb1
Re: Architeture Choose
On Fri, 2010-11-05 at 14:30 -0400, Joe McDonagh wrote: If your Sun fails -- that's a big IF. It's approaching a possibility of 0 in my experience. If performance isn't an issue and stability is your chief goal, none of this hardware is as stable as a Sun. Not quite my experience. In 2001 I worked at a place with a lot of used Sun hardware courtesy of Fujitsu layoffs (Sparc 20s, Ultra 5s). Entirely too many fried ethernet ports on the sparc 20s. And it took too many iterations to find a sparc 20 that wouldn't crash and burn while building OpenBSD from source. A fidgety developer kicking an ultra 5 from a | orientation to a _ orientation would reliably destroy the power supply and harddrives. On the bright side, I could repair the ultra 5s with power supply and drives scavenged from eMachines with ALI motherboards with the wonderful DMA that shoved garbage into memory for every OS we tried on them. I thought the Micro Channel based RS/6Ks (Before the horrid SMP ones designed by Group Bull) were a bit more bullet proof, with the only dead hardware I'd experience being. 1) Rats pissing on the system boards, because the customer refused to keep the covers on their systems in manufacturing. 2) A ladybird beetle invasion. The RT PC was pretty reliable too. I had one manufactured in 1987 that was still trundling along in 2006 when I gave it away.
Re: Architeture Choose
On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 9:44 AM, Christopher Dukes pak...@pr.neotoma.org wrote: On Fri, 2010-11-05 at 14:30 -0400, Joe McDonagh wrote: If your Sun fails -- that's a big IF. It's approaching a possibility of 0 in my experience. If performance isn't an issue and stability is your chief goal, none of this hardware is as stable as a Sun. Not quite my experience. In 2001 I worked at a place with a lot of used Sun hardware courtesy of Fujitsu layoffs (Sparc 20s, Ultra 5s). Entirely too many fried ethernet ports on the sparc 20s. And it took too many iterations to find a sparc 20 that wouldn't crash and burn while building OpenBSD from source. A fidgety developer kicking an ultra 5 from a | orientation to a _ orientation would reliably destroy the power supply and harddrives. On the bright side, I could repair the ultra 5s with power supply and drives scavenged from eMachines with ALI motherboards with the wonderful DMA that shoved garbage into memory for every OS we tried on them. I had a U10 with a Gig of ram that would crash during building. It turned out to be a bad RAM module. I'm with Henning though. I've yet to see a dead Netra, stacks and stacks of e220r/e420r's that haven't ever had any issues. I used to have a bunch of the e220r series that had like 4 years (maybe more) worth of dmesg's in the output because they were never powered off, only restarted for upgrades. -B
Re: Architeture Choose
On 11/08/2010 12:44 PM, Christopher Dukes wrote: On Fri, 2010-11-05 at 14:30 -0400, Joe McDonagh wrote: If your Sun fails-- that's a big IF. It's approaching a possibility of 0 in my experience. If performance isn't an issue and stability is your chief goal, none of this hardware is as stable as a Sun. Not quite my experience. In 2001 I worked at a place with a lot of used Sun hardware courtesy of Fujitsu layoffs (Sparc 20s, Ultra 5s). Entirely too many fried ethernet ports on the sparc 20s. And it took too many iterations to find a sparc 20 that wouldn't crash and burn while building OpenBSD from source. A fidgety developer kicking an ultra 5 from a | orientation to a _ orientation would reliably destroy the power supply and harddrives. On the bright side, I could repair the ultra 5s with power supply and drives scavenged from eMachines with ALI motherboards with the wonderful DMA that shoved garbage into memory for every OS we tried on them. I thought the Micro Channel based RS/6Ks (Before the horrid SMP ones designed by Group Bull) were a bit more bullet proof, with the only dead hardware I'd experience being. 1) Rats pissing on the system boards, because the customer refused to keep the covers on their systems in manufacturing. 2) A ladybird beetle invasion. The RT PC was pretty reliable too. I had one manufactured in 1987 that was still trundling along in 2006 when I gave it away. To be fair, the ultra 5 was sort of an attempt to cut corners and produce 'cheaper' workstations. They also OEM'd their boards at that point (my first Sun was an Ultra 5 board in some kind of no-name chassis). The next iteration, the Blade 100, had a fair amount of problems but generally, you get what you pay for. I'm talking more about their servers in terms of reliability. -- Joe McDonagh AIM: YoosingYoonickz IRC: joe-mac on freenode When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
Re: Architeture Choose
Thanks everybodu for the tips... For now, tending to i386/amd64... Found a Sun Fire V20z, 2xOpteron cheaper than the V100... Current candidate for my next server... []'s! On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 8:08 PM, Joe McDonagh joseph.e.mcdon...@gmail.comwrote: On 11/08/2010 12:44 PM, Christopher Dukes wrote: On Fri, 2010-11-05 at 14:30 -0400, Joe McDonagh wrote: If your Sun fails-- that's a big IF. It's approaching a possibility of 0 in my experience. If performance isn't an issue and stability is your chief goal, none of this hardware is as stable as a Sun. Not quite my experience. In 2001 I worked at a place with a lot of used Sun hardware courtesy of Fujitsu layoffs (Sparc 20s, Ultra 5s). Entirely too many fried ethernet ports on the sparc 20s. And it took too many iterations to find a sparc 20 that wouldn't crash and burn while building OpenBSD from source. A fidgety developer kicking an ultra 5 from a | orientation to a _ orientation would reliably destroy the power supply and harddrives. On the bright side, I could repair the ultra 5s with power supply and drives scavenged from eMachines with ALI motherboards with the wonderful DMA that shoved garbage into memory for every OS we tried on them. I thought the Micro Channel based RS/6Ks (Before the horrid SMP ones designed by Group Bull) were a bit more bullet proof, with the only dead hardware I'd experience being. 1) Rats pissing on the system boards, because the customer refused to keep the covers on their systems in manufacturing. 2) A ladybird beetle invasion. The RT PC was pretty reliable too. I had one manufactured in 1987 that was still trundling along in 2006 when I gave it away. To be fair, the ultra 5 was sort of an attempt to cut corners and produce 'cheaper' workstations. They also OEM'd their boards at that point (my first Sun was an Ultra 5 board in some kind of no-name chassis). The next iteration, the Blade 100, had a fair amount of problems but generally, you get what you pay for. I'm talking more about their servers in terms of reliability. -- Joe McDonagh AIM: YoosingYoonickz IRC: joe-mac on freenode When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
Re: Architeture Choose
The idea is to build an server with: WWW/Email/Firewall funcionalities, with better stablity as possible. You might want to consider separating the firewall from everything else. What you want from a firewall machine can be (and probably is) very different than what you want from a server. A) Sun Fire V100 UltraSPARC IIi 650 Mhz - 2x160Gb Hd - 2Gb RAM - CDROM - US$ 350 B) Apple Power PC G4 733 Mhz - 768 Gb RAM - 38Gb HD - US$ 320,00 C) Atlhon 64 X2 +5200, 2 GB RAM, 160Gb HD - US$ 320,00 Assuming that each of these is enough for your intended server, I would go for the Athlon, because i386/amd64 hardware is ubiquitous and laughably cheap, so if something breaks, you will find a replacement for peanuts. No exactly so with Sun or Apple hardware. That said, $320 seems to much to me.
Re: Architeture Choose
* Nick n...@holland-consulting.net [2010-11-07 05:16]: On 11/05/10 14:29, Joe McDonagh wrote: If your Sun fails -- that's a big IF. It's approaching a possibility of 0 in my experience. If performance isn't an issue and stability is your chief goal, none of this hardware is as stable as a Sun. Good to hear your experience with sun HW is better than mine. SS20s overheat U1's pop power supplies (gone through three in my PERSONAL stock!) U5/U10/AXi pop processors (three, in my personal stock) U2's have issues with connectors (blow out dust, clean 'em up, can do much better). That's all my personal systems. At work, I have evidence that E250s and E450s blow power supplies (the bad power supplies make great monitor stands), v250 power supplies are expensive to get (and they DON'T make good monitor stands), T1-105s can blow main boards, E4500s can blow CPUs (and come back up with the bad processor off-line in solaris. impressive!). T2000s light up wrench lights and finding out why is a surprisingly difficult. (this is all ignoring the CMOS batteries which die and take out the system's MAC address). interesting. i run ~25 t1 105s. for ages. 3 have fan failures. that's it. and they run fine without replacing that fan even :) a handful of v100, v120, v210 each. no failures at all. i think i had one ss20 die ages ago. at a point where that kind of machine was ancient already. i still have a stack of them somewhere. prety sure if i'd power them up now the vast majority would be ok after un-dusting, reseating mem and the like. my u1s are alive (but off too). the ss5s probably in the same boat as the ss20s. even the really ancient ipxes are pbly still ok. can't be bothered to check tho. u5/u10 was crap, for sun standards, and if memory serves i had one out of 3 fail. u30 alive. e220r, e420r, no failures. so the only ones that ever failed (fans and disks i expect to fail sooner or later, so my definition of machine failed excludes these parts) were not from the server line, but workstations. that matches the majority of your list. that track record is way ahead of anything else i run and ever ran. i have to add here that i have extremely low failure rates. apparently a pretty good hand at picking hardware plus a very friendly environment - data center, very stable and low temp, high forced airflow, very little dust. oh, and that covers only sparc/sparc64 gear. sun's x86 gear was never even remotely up to that standards, haven't seen a single that remotely convinced me, the few i worked with... x2100 of both generations were the trigger to not consider sun for x86 gear, they're misdesigned shit. recently worked with some x4something at a customer, holy crap, their management stuff these days is so incredibly bad and not helping at all, but drastically in the way. -- Henning Brauer, h...@bsws.de, henn...@openbsd.org BS Web Services, http://bsws.de Full-Service ISP - Secure Hosting, Mail and DNS Services Dedicated Servers, Rootservers, Application Hosting
Re: Architeture Choose
On 7 Nov 2010 at 11:32, Henning Brauer wrote: even the really ancient ipxes are pbly still ok. can't be bothered to check tho. Still using several ipxes here, online 24/7, one is the obsd border router.
Re: Architeture Choose
--On November 5, 2010 9:47:20 AM -0300 Felipe Mesquita de Oliveira fem...@gmail.com wrote: Hi All, I'm long time far from OpenBSD world, but planning to come back. The plan is to buy an old machine, but, maybe try an new platform, if the investment worths... I have these options, all in the same price range: A) Sun Fire V100 UltraSPARC IIi 650 Mhz - 2x160Gb Hd - 2Gb RAM - CDROM - US$ 350 B) Apple Power PC G4 733 Mhz - 768 Gb RAM - 38Gb HD - US$ 320,00 C) Atlhon 64 X2 +5200, 2 GB RAM, 160Gb HD - US$ 320,00 The idea is to build an server with: WWW/Email/Firewall funcionalities, with better stablity as possible. I don't think that I will need to upgrade for an period, but pieces that have mechanical components (Hd, cooler) may be a problem, if they are platform-exclusive... Thanks for any help, and sorry for any mistake in my English.. Most of the time I would say go with the Sun server for relatively trouble free computing. However the v100 has no PCI expandability and only a pretty wimpy IDE bus. So if you want to upgrade to GigE or add more disk you are SOL. If you can get your hands on a v120 its almost the same system but with a internal/external SCSI bus and one expansion port. (down side to this is the 2 internal SCSI drives are pricey to replace) These servers are great headless firewall/light application servers. And the LOM port is wonderful if you happen to have a digi or other serial port server. Parts (other than disk) are more money than the system is worth usually... The Mac G4: to many headaches IMO (I have 3 or four collecting dust now 400-1.3g). but parts are cheap as long as its no the PS, CPU or logic board (most of the system). I've lost the GigE port on the logic board on 2 of my systems, real pain. Atlhon: cheap easy to get parts, upgrade to some degree... great if you love to tinker. And $320 seems very pricey to me for any of theses systems.
Re: Architeture Choose
Hi Felipe, I'd immediately exclude B, as apple hardware is sometimes a nightmare to jack with and, due to lack of proper fresh air inflow, their logic boards (=motherboards) die at a greater range than other vendors' ones. Go on C if you just need bare power and an easy way to find spare parts in case of damages. Anyway, the machine C is not a server, so, if you don't regularly keep it clean (physically! be a dustbuster!), checked and backed up you might have surprises on the long run. Go on A if you need a real server, keeping an eye on disks (they will be crunched after all those years, so already plan a substitution with fresh ones). If the machine will be in order, it'll last for many years to come... (don't forget a good UPS!). Btw, if you are kinda risky you might also try to mount on it a gigabit card... although I dunno if the CPU can handle reliably that much throughput! Ciao :) On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 1:47 PM, Felipe Mesquita de Oliveira fem...@gmail.com wrote: A) Sun Fire V100 UltraSPARC IIi 650 Mhz - 2x160Gb Hd - 2Gb RAM - CDROM - US$ 350 B) Apple Power PC G4 733 Mhz - 768 Gb RAM - 38Gb HD - US$ 320,00 C) Atlhon 64 X2 +5200, 2 GB RAM, 160Gb HD - US$ 320,00 The idea is to build an server with: WWW/Email/Firewall funcionalities, with better stablity as possible.
Re: Architeture Choose
On 11/05/10 14:29, Joe McDonagh wrote: If your Sun fails -- that's a big IF. It's approaching a possibility of 0 in my experience. If performance isn't an issue and stability is your chief goal, none of this hardware is as stable as a Sun. Good to hear your experience with sun HW is better than mine. SS20s overheat U1's pop power supplies (gone through three in my PERSONAL stock!) U5/U10/AXi pop processors (three, in my personal stock) U2's have issues with connectors (blow out dust, clean 'em up, can do much better). That's all my personal systems. At work, I have evidence that E250s and E450s blow power supplies (the bad power supplies make great monitor stands), v250 power supplies are expensive to get (and they DON'T make good monitor stands), T1-105s can blow main boards, E4500s can blow CPUs (and come back up with the bad processor off-line in solaris. impressive!). T2000s light up wrench lights and finding out why is a surprisingly difficult. (this is all ignoring the CMOS batteries which die and take out the system's MAC address). On the other hand, I have a U60 that had a very traumatic trip to my front porch, judging from the amount of uncracked case plastic on it and unbent frame in it (none. Thing probably took one heck of a chunk out of the UPS truck), but still works just fine, and a U5 at work that has been running an app for probably the last ten years with probably less than five hours total downtime (original disk. I'm scared). I can point to PCs with similar feats, though. Suns are good, but they aren't beyond failure, and since failure means you can't stick the disks in a commodity machine, you had best be prepared in advance for the failure of the hardware. Anyway... All hardware can fail. Be ready for it. Don't pretend it won't, unless you already have the new job lined up. If you run a highly regarded brand that doesn't fail, you will be worse off than the person who runs known-junk, but has spare parts on hand and a plan to deal with failures. (I work at a place with some doesn't fail stuff that does...and a lot of old junk that we have spare parts for which is less scary when things break. Now, if only I could convince management to keep my junk pile deep and wide). Nick.
Architeture Choose
Hi All, I'm long time far from OpenBSD world, but planning to come back. The plan is to buy an old machine, but, maybe try an new platform, if the investment worths... I have these options, all in the same price range: A) Sun Fire V100 UltraSPARC IIi 650 Mhz - 2x160Gb Hd - 2Gb RAM - CDROM - US$ 350 B) Apple Power PC G4 733 Mhz - 768 Gb RAM - 38Gb HD - US$ 320,00 C) Atlhon 64 X2 +5200, 2 GB RAM, 160Gb HD - US$ 320,00 The idea is to build an server with: WWW/Email/Firewall funcionalities, with better stablity as possible. I don't think that I will need to upgrade for an period, but pieces that have mechanical components (Hd, cooler) may be a problem, if they are platform-exclusive... Thanks for any help, and sorry for any mistake in my English.. Best Regards, Felipe SP-Brazil
Re: Architeture Choose
On 05-Nov-10 05:47, Felipe Mesquita de Oliveira wrote: C) Atlhon 64 X2 +5200, 2 GB RAM, 160Gb HD - US$ 320,00 The idea is to build an server with: WWW/Email/Firewall funcionalities, with better stablity as possible. You'll get a lot more performance out of the AMD X2. Plus both i386 and AMD64 are still king in the commodity hardware market, and are a dime-a-dozen nowadays. Literally everyone and their grandmothers own x86 based hardware. The i386 platform has support for the most bits of hardware and replacement parts are stupidly easy to come by. -Christopher Ahrens- -Co-founder -LeviaComm Networks-
Re: Architeture Choose
I have an emac that I just updated to 4.8 macppc, and it as expected, it works great.B I used to run OpenBSD on an old ultra5, and it also worked great. x86 might be the most common, but the other architectures work very well too. For what you are doing it looks like all these machines will be fine from a performance standpoint, but as Christopher said, the Athlon will be the snappiest. I'd still get the Sun box though, assuming the fan noise isn't a problem. -- Jeremy Chase http://twitter.com/jeremychase On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 9:14 AM, LeviaComm Networks n...@leviacomm.net wrote: On 05-Nov-10 05:47, Felipe Mesquita de Oliveira wrote: C) Atlhon 64 X2 +5200, 2 GB RAM, 160Gb HD - B US$ 320,00 The idea is to build an server with: WWW/Email/Firewall funcionalities, with better stablity as possible. You'll get a lot more performance out of the AMD X2. B Plus both i386 and AMD64 are still king in the commodity hardware market, and are a dime-a-dozen nowadays. B Literally everyone and their grandmothers own x86 based hardware. B The i386 platform has support for the most bits of hardware and replacement parts are stupidly easy to come by. -Christopher Ahrens- -Co-founder -LeviaComm Networks-
Re: Architeture Choose
On 11/05/10 08:46, Felipe Mesquita de Oliveira wrote: Hi All, I'm long time far from OpenBSD world, but planning to come back. The plan is to buy an old machine, but, maybe try an new platform, if the investment worths... I have these options, all in the same price range: A) Sun Fire V100 UltraSPARC IIi 650 Mhz - 2x160Gb Hd - 2Gb RAM - CDROM - US$ 350 B) Apple Power PC G4 733 Mhz - 768 Gb RAM - 38Gb HD - US$ 320,00 C) Atlhon 64 X2 +5200, 2 GB RAM, 160Gb HD - US$ 320,00 The idea is to build an server with: WWW/Email/Firewall funcionalities, with better stablity as possible. I don't think that I will need to upgrade for an period, but pieces that have mechanical components (Hd, cooler) may be a problem, if they are platform-exclusive... Thanks for any help, and sorry for any mistake in my English.. Best Regards, Felipe SP-Brazil well... Given that choice, I'd go for the Athlon if you need performance (you probably won't), or the Sun Fire v100 if you want to learn something new. I'm not fond of MacPPC machines for the very reason many people love them: the style. The cute cases are a pain in the butt to deal with -- I use a lot of wire rack shelving units, I actually have to velcro-tie the tower macppc systems to the rack to keep the bottom handle from slipping over the front of the shelf and ending up on the floor. The prices on all of them seem high to me, at least in my market. That doesn't mean much. :) One thing to consider is what happens if the box itself fails. OpenBSD is great about moving disks to new hardware in the same platform, but if your Sun fails, you need a compatible sun, if your MacPPC fails, you need another macppc, if your amd64 fails, you need another amd64 (or i386, if you have installed OpenBSD/i386). So, if you run on a macppc or sun system, in the event of failure, you will need to put your hands on a similar machine quickly. The 160G disks in the Sun Fire v100 might hurt you in that regard -- a lot of the Sun IDE disk systems are hw limited to 128G, so you won't be able to stick your 160G disks in an Ultra5, Ultra10, or a Blade100 should your v100 fail. If you go with this machine, I'd put smaller disks in it in case you have to fall back to a U5/U10. If you have to do a cross-platform move, it will require restoring data from your backup, you can't (in general) mount disks from one platform in another and read the data. Nick.
Re: Architeture Choose
I'm not fond of MacPPC machines for the very reason many people love them: the style. B The cute cases are a pain in the butt to deal with I second that. I had to replace the HD in my emac and I literally had to take the motherboard out to get access. -- Jeremy Chase http://twitter.com/jeremychase On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 1:14 PM, Nick Holland n...@holland-consulting.net wrote: On 11/05/10 08:46, Felipe Mesquita de Oliveira wrote: Hi All, I'm long time far from OpenBSD world, but planning to come back. The plan is to buy an old machine, but, maybe try an new platform, if the investment worths... I have these options, all in the same price range: A) Sun Fire V100 UltraSPARC IIi 650 Mhz - 2x160Gb Hd - 2Gb RAM - CDROM - US$ 350 B) Apple Power PC G4 733 Mhz - 768 Gb RAM - 38Gb HD - B US$ 320,00 C) Atlhon 64 X2 +5200, 2 GB RAM, 160Gb HD - B US$ 320,00 The idea is to build an server with: WWW/Email/Firewall funcionalities, with better stablity as possible. I don't think that I will need to upgrade for an period, but pieces that have mechanical components (Hd, cooler) may be a problem, if they are platform-exclusive... Thanks for any help, and sorry for any mistake in my English.. Best Regards, Felipe SP-Brazil well... B Given that choice, I'd go for the Athlon if you need performance (you probably won't), or the Sun Fire v100 if you want to learn something new. I'm not fond of MacPPC machines for the very reason many people love them: the style. B The cute cases are a pain in the butt to deal with -- I use a lot of wire rack shelving units, I actually have to velcro-tie the tower macppc systems to the rack to keep the bottom handle from slipping over the front of the shelf and ending up on the floor. The prices on all of them seem high to me, at least in my market. B That doesn't mean much. B :) One thing to consider is what happens if the box itself fails. B OpenBSD is great about moving disks to new hardware in the same platform, but if your Sun fails, you need a compatible sun, if your MacPPC fails, you need another macppc, if your amd64 fails, you need another amd64 (or i386, if you have installed OpenBSD/i386). B So, if you run on a macppc or sun system, in the event of failure, you will need to put your hands on a similar machine quickly. B The 160G disks in the Sun Fire v100 might hurt you in that regard -- a lot of the Sun IDE disk systems are hw limited to 128G, so you won't be able to stick your 160G disks in an Ultra5, Ultra10, or a Blade100 should your v100 fail. B If you go with this machine, I'd put smaller disks in it in case you have to fall back to a U5/U10. If you have to do a cross-platform move, it will require restoring data from your backup, you can't (in general) mount disks from one platform in another and read the data. Nick.
Re: Architeture Choose
If your Sun fails -- that's a big IF. It's approaching a possibility of 0 in my experience. If performance isn't an issue and stability is your chief goal, none of this hardware is as stable as a Sun. On 11/05/2010 01:14 PM, Nick Holland wrote: On 11/05/10 08:46, Felipe Mesquita de Oliveira wrote: Hi All, I'm long time far from OpenBSD world, but planning to come back. The plan is to buy an old machine, but, maybe try an new platform, if the investment worths... I have these options, all in the same price range: A) Sun Fire V100 UltraSPARC IIi 650 Mhz - 2x160Gb Hd - 2Gb RAM - CDROM - US$ 350 B) Apple Power PC G4 733 Mhz - 768 Gb RAM - 38Gb HD - US$ 320,00 C) Atlhon 64 X2 +5200, 2 GB RAM, 160Gb HD - US$ 320,00 The idea is to build an server with: WWW/Email/Firewall funcionalities, with better stablity as possible. I don't think that I will need to upgrade for an period, but pieces that have mechanical components (Hd, cooler) may be a problem, if they are platform-exclusive... Thanks for any help, and sorry for any mistake in my English.. Best Regards, Felipe SP-Brazil well... Given that choice, I'd go for the Athlon if you need performance (you probably won't), or the Sun Fire v100 if you want to learn something new. I'm not fond of MacPPC machines for the very reason many people love them: the style. The cute cases are a pain in the butt to deal with -- I use a lot of wire rack shelving units, I actually have to velcro-tie the tower macppc systems to the rack to keep the bottom handle from slipping over the front of the shelf and ending up on the floor. The prices on all of them seem high to me, at least in my market. That doesn't mean much. :) One thing to consider is what happens if the box itself fails. OpenBSD is great about moving disks to new hardware in the same platform, but if your Sun fails, you need a compatible sun, if your MacPPC fails, you need another macppc, if your amd64 fails, you need another amd64 (or i386, if you have installed OpenBSD/i386). So, if you run on a macppc or sun system, in the event of failure, you will need to put your hands on a similar machine quickly. The 160G disks in the Sun Fire v100 might hurt you in that regard -- a lot of the Sun IDE disk systems are hw limited to 128G, so you won't be able to stick your 160G disks in an Ultra5, Ultra10, or a Blade100 should your v100 fail. If you go with this machine, I'd put smaller disks in it in case you have to fall back to a U5/U10. If you have to do a cross-platform move, it will require restoring data from your backup, you can't (in general) mount disks from one platform in another and read the data. Nick. -- Joe McDonagh AIM: YoosingYoonickz IRC: joe-mac on freenode When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
Re: Architeture Choose
Back to tha listing =) Thank you everybody for the answers. About the prices, in Brazil we have MercadoLivre (sort of a eBay) Every kind of equipament here is more expensive because of both shipping and fees.. I've translated the prices to US dollar for you to know which choice will be the best cost-benefit option What I really like about the Sun Server was the size... any of the other will take me much more space... BUT, how the guys adviced me, the pictures can't tell how loud the fan can sound... The idea was really to learn something new... I've already used OBSD under i386 with really good results (about a year w/o restart)... I wonder if the other platforms are as good as i386, or even better, form the point of stability... Cheers, Felipe SP-Brazil On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 2:25 PM, Jeremy Chase jeremych...@gmail.com wrote: Excellent email, but you didn't send it to the original author. I included him on this forward. :) -- Jeremy Chase http://twitter.com/jeremychase On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 1:15 PM, David Astua dast...@gmail.com wrote: 2010/11/5 Jeremy Chase jeremych...@gmail.com: I have an emac that I just updated to 4.8 macppc, and it as expected, it works great.B I used to run OpenBSD on an old ultra5, and it also worked great. x86 might be the most common, but the other architectures work very well too. For what you are doing it looks like all these machines will be fine from a performance standpoint, but as Christopher said, the Athlon will be the snappiest. I'd still get the Sun box though, assuming the fan noise isn't a problem. -- Jeremy Chase http://twitter.com/jeremychase On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 9:14 AM, LeviaComm Networks n...@leviacomm.net wrote: On 05-Nov-10 05:47, Felipe Mesquita de Oliveira wrote: C) Atlhon 64 X2 +5200, 2 GB RAM, 160Gb HD - B US$ 320,00 The idea is to build an server with: WWW/Email/Firewall funcionalities, with better stablity as possible. You'll get a lot more performance out of the AMD X2. B Plus both i386 and AMD64 are still king in the commodity hardware market, and are a dime-a-dozen nowadays. B Literally everyone and their grandmothers own x86 based hardware. B The i386 platform has support for the most bits of hardware and replacement parts are stupidly easy to come by. -Christopher Ahrens- -Co-founder -LeviaComm Networks- I've got two old Sun servers one month ago, one of them is a Sunfire like the one you're planing to buy the other is a Netra X1 a bit less powerful. Coincidentally my desktop has the same configuration as the AMD you're mentioning, the performance of the desktop is a bit better, anyway i need to do some further testing. Because think the Sun would respond better under heavy load against the normal performance degradation on my desktop if there's a lot of requests. I'm just messing around with this non-traditional architecture, but take care of the fan noise stated above, the NIC's bundled in the Sun equipments are much better than most on-board NICs, also the LOM interface on the Sun servers is really nice. They're working smoothly! Where are you planning to buy the equipment? I notice that the prices for the equipments are a bit high (for eBay), or you've to pay a lot of shipping/taxes? I hope this helps. Best regards; -- David A. NOTE: If you bought the Sun server don't forget to get the RJ45 - DB9 converter.
Re: Architeture Choose
On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 11:30 AM, Joe McDonagh joseph.e.mcdon...@gmail.com wrote: If your Sun fails -- that's a big IF. It's approaching a possibility of 0 in my experience. If performance isn't an issue and stability is your chief goal, none of this hardware is as stable as a Sun. Agreed I've only seen 3 Sun hardware failures (I'm talking about sparcs) in something like 15 years (not counting things like disks or whatever). One was an IPX, that had a motherboard battery die and was easily replaced, but took some work to figure out how to rewrite the prom (after 17 or so years this is still running), another e450 that someone had modified to 'make it faster' and it kept blowing some CPU bridge-thing, and another ultra 1 with an actual logic board failure (it was 10 years old by that point though). as an aside I've thought about putting a bigger disk in the IPX just to see how long it takes to make a release. My netra T1 takes 24 hours and 5.5 seconds to make a full release (including X). Based on absolutely no calculations at all I'd guess a month and 5 seconds. Just for fun: OpenBSD 4.7 (GENERIC) #152: Fri Mar 19 02:33:48 MDT 2010 dera...@sparc.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/sparc/compile/GENERIC real mem = 66973696 (63MB) avail mem = 59752448 (56MB) mainbus0 at root: SUNW,Sun 4/50 cpu0 at mainbus0: W8601/8701 or MB86903 @ 40 MHz, on-chip FPU; cache chip bug - trap page uncached cpu0: 64K byte write-through, 32 bytes/line, hw flush cache enabled memreg0 at mainbus0 ioaddr 0xf400 clock0 at mainbus0 ioaddr 0xf200: mk48t02 (eeprom) timer0 at mainbus0 ioaddr 0xf300 delay constant 17 auxreg0 at mainbus0 ioaddr 0xf743 zs0 at mainbus0 ioaddr 0xf100 pri 12, softpri 6 zstty0 at zs0 channel 0 zstty1 at zs0 channel 1 zs1 at mainbus0 ioaddr 0xf000 pri 12, softpri 6 zskbd0 at zs1 channel 0: keyboard, type 5, layout 0x22 wskbd0 at zskbd0: console keyboard zsms0 at zs1 channel 1 wsmouse0 at zsms0 mux 0 audioamd0 at mainbus0 ioaddr 0xf7201000 pri 13, softpri 4 audio0 at audioamd0 sbus0 at mainbus0 ioaddr 0xf800: clock = 20 MHz dma0 at sbus0 slot 0 offset 0x40: rev 1+ esp0 at sbus0 slot 0 offset 0x80 pri 3: ESP100A, 25MHz scsibus0 at esp0: 8 targets, initiator 7 probe(esp0:3:0): max sync rate 8.33MB/s sd0 at scsibus0 targ 3 lun 0: IBMRAID, DFHSS4F9337, 4I4I SCSI2 0/direct fixed sd0: 4303MB, 512 bytes/sec, 8813870 sec total le0 at sbus0 slot 0 offset 0xc0 pri 5: address 08:00:20:08:b4:84 le0: 16 receive buffers, 4 transmit buffers dma1 at sbus0 slot 1 offset 0x81000: rev esc esp1 at dma1 offset 0x8 pri 3: ESP200, 40MHz scsibus1 at esp1: 8 targets, initiator 7 lebuffer0 at sbus0 slot 1 offset 0x4: 128K memory le1 at lebuffer0 offset 0x6 pri 5: address 08:00:20:08:b4:84 le1: 64 receive buffers, 16 transmit buffers dma2 at sbus0 slot 2 offset 0x81000: rev esc esp2 at dma2 offset 0x8 pri 3: ESP200, 25MHz scsibus2 at esp2: 8 targets, initiator 7 lebuffer1 at sbus0 slot 2 offset 0x4: 128K memory le2 at lebuffer1 offset 0x6 pri 5: address 08:00:20:08:b4:84 le2: 64 receive buffers, 16 transmit buffers cgsix0 at sbus0 slot 3 offset 0x0 pri 7: SUNW,501-1672, 1152x900, rev 8 wsdisplay0 at cgsix0 mux 1: console (std, sun emulation), using wskbd0 fdc0 at mainbus0 ioaddr 0xf720 pri 11, softpri 4: chip 82072 fd0 at fdc0 drive 0: 1.44MB 80 cyl, 2 head, 18 sec vscsi0 at root scsibus3 at vscsi0: 256 targets softraid0 at root bootpath: /s...@1,f800/e...@0,80/s...@3,0 root on sd0a swap on sd0b dump on sd0
