by Void Main » Sat Sep 17, 2005 7:34 am
I don't know if I would invest a lot of money in it but you will have fun playing with it. I'm a little concerned about the memory configuration error they "got rid of" by moving the memory around. I'm betting there is a bad memory chip (I used to get that alot on Sun hardware). I have run Debian on Ultra 10 boxes and on older Sparc 20s and it works fairly well. You might run into issues with certain software because of the processor architecture differences. For instance I ran into SNMP problems because there were a 32 bit counters and the UltraSparc is a 64 bit processor. I ended up creating a patch for net-snmp and sending it in to fix the problem. Overall I would never buy Sun hardware for personal use. In fact all of the UltraSPARC machines I put Linux on at work are now sitting in the corner doing nothing. I would give them away if my work would let me. I believe that Blade 100 was only around $1000 brand new which is unheard of for Sun. Most of our Sun hardware is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but we run Solaris on them (yuck!). We have a lot of HP DLx80 (x86 based) servers running Linux though. Good luck with it though and I may or may not be able to help. I do still have a couple of Sparc 10s running Debian so I may or may not be able to help with problems.