[Ron_Jeremy]

Well, I found this an interesting read, so I thought I'd share

[patto]

Cool, a good use of technology and Linux.

[HisMajestyTheKing]

A Couple of things though.

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However, the only distribution with 64-bit support was SuSE, and most other applications, such as OpenOffice.org, still were running on 32-bit.

He doesn't need 64-bit software for the Opteron. It'll be happy with 32-bit.

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I finally chose Xeon as I found it beats Opteron in most 32-bit tests

Most? Perhaps a few. Or perhaps most relevant to him.

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the hyperthreading technology made my dual Xeon system functions like a system with four CPUs.

Yeah right.

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However, ECC RAM works in pairs

Wrong again. He probably needs to install pairs of DIMMs, nothing which is related to ECC or non-ECC.

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I had no choice but to get the maximum amount of 4GB, the maximum RAM size any 32-bit system can handle.

Can handle more through hacks.

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Recently, I installed several systems with serial ATA hard drives and found they perform much better than those with Ultra-DMA IDE drives. With the price of serial ATA drives coming down so rapidly (they are almost the same price as the parallel IDE drive), they probably soon will make SCSI obsolete--SCSI is just too expensive.

Price won't make SCSI obsolete. For some tasks it'll remain the better solution. Other firmware, better managability, ...

He definitely needs to brush up his hardware knowledge.

Nice setup though and a good use of old hardware.

[Sivar]

I completely agree, but compared to the people that were in my high school, this guy is Scott Mueller.

[blakerwry]

his majesty, not everyone is a computer geek. This guy obviously is lacking some bits of basic hardware knowledge, but it's not his specialty.

As Sivar said, compared to anyone in my high school, this guy is a genius.

-btw, in the high school that i went to they paid $1000 if they had to add a new machine to the twisted pair ethernet network... that's how inteligent they were. They werent smart enough to use a distributed star topology or even MUTOAs or consolidation points.

They also refused to upgrade to win98 (from win95) because they werent trained for win98.... so students were stuck with win95 machines which crashed daily.

Any machines that came with win98, or heaven forbid winNT, had the disks thrown out and win95 ghosted onto them.

[Sivar]

I worked very hard to implement LTSP at a univ. in Santa Barbara. Everything worked out perfectly--we had the hardware, we had the performance, we had proof that the system could easily handle the load (the server was insane overkill), but one major problem stopped the whole project--
XFree86 absolutely, positively, would not work with OpenVMS X software. Period. It just staunchly refused. When I forced VMS to spew its X packets to an LTSP terminal, the terminal locked up hard. Perhaps our VMS didn't translate to network byte order?
The terminals worked fine with X applications from OSF/1; they worked great with X applications from Alpha Linux and x86 Linux, but because VMS was a critical system at the univ., the project was put on hold.
The guys we bought the terminals from had no idea (and they maintain LTSP, so they aren't the average dumb tier-1 tech support guys), nobody on USEnet had any useful ideas--it just wasn't meant to happen.
In any case, I never did get that problem solved. It was the single most time-consuming, frustrating computer problem I have ever experienced, and it didn't help that I was far from being a VMS expert.

[gbb123]

Sivar, on Mar 11 2004, 03:33 PM, said:

XFree86 absolutely, positively, would not work with OpenVMS X software. Period. It just staunchly refused.




it didn't help that I was far from being a VMS expert.

what is VMS? Please give me a detailed explanation, thanks,

Garrett

[Kenneth]

VMS is an older os from Digital Equipment Corp. I think it started on VAX and them moved to Alpha processors. It was quite stable and have some interesting clustering tech. With DEC purchased by Compaq how was purchased by HP, it is almost dead.

NT has alot of design roots in VMS. Past that try google.

[Chewy509]

Kenneth, on Mar 12 2004, 04:16 PM, said:

It was quite stable...

I believe that is a bit of an understatment. Several years ago, I had to decommission a VMS box, (to be replaced with NT4, gasp). It's uptime was just over 3.5 years, and IIRC it only went down then, because 3 out of the 5 disks (RAID 5) died in rapid succession... But in it's 8+ year life, only had about 2 days downtime, (according to the maintenance log)...

Also there are a lot of stories on the net about VMS boxes having *huge* uptimes. I once read this on the net:

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Windows has an uptime measured in days, Unix in months, but VMS, well, we don't exactly know yet, but all I know, this VMS box hasn't crashed in years!

IIRC HP's Non-stop server range all run VMS.

[gbb123]

Chewy509, on Mar 12 2004, 02:25 AM, said:

It's uptime was just over 3.5 years, and IIRC it only went down then, because 3 out of the 5 disks (RAID 5) died in rapid succession...


IIRC HP's Non-stop server range all run VMS.

what is IIRC ??