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.
