[cobalt-users] Re: The new $995 Sun UNIX(r)/RISC King of the road!

[Johan-Kristian Wold <jkwold@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Zeffie wrote:
> <snip>Can you see the Sun?
> It's briliant and so is this!
> It's a baby!
> Born the same day as the XTR (whatever)
> The new $995 Sun UNIX(r)/RISC King of the road!
> A Real 64-bit UltraSPARC processor!
> A Real Company!
> A Huge World Wide King of the keys!
> The Netra X1 server comes complete at $995us
> http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/hw/networking/netrax/X1/marketpaper.
> html
<snip>

A very nice box indeed, for its purpose.

I do see some potential weaknesses, though:

Without a scsi port, you'll need some kind of network backup 
solution, which tends to be expensive for Solaris machines. I don't 
think it comes with the backup system in the Cobalt GUI. There might 
be some open source stuff out there, supporting networked backups of 
Solaris boxes, without me having looked too much for it, and you can 
certainly cobble up something, using tar or dump and ftp or a number 
of other utilities, it'll be up to you to get this to work. OTOH, I 
don't feel very comfortable with the backup system in the cobalts 
either, as a number of people on the list have had problems restoring 
stuff.

Solaris is not Linux - I'm not sure if the Solaris verion bundle with 
the box contains compilers. If it does, a recompile will be fairly 
simple for most of the open source packages out there. If it doesn't, 
you'll have to stick to precompiled stuff and perl scripts and so on, 
unless you get an extra Solaris box that has compilers installed.

If we didn't already have a web/mail server, and we already have Sun 
boxes, and a network backup system that supports Solaris (and Cobalt, 
for that matter), I'd consider this one carefully. I'd like to get my 
hands on one of those to play with, though :^)

Johan-kr

--
Johan-Kristian Wold, M.Sc.     |
Computer systems administrator | Recursive: Adj. See recursive.
Nor-Trykk Narvik AS            |
jkwold@xxxxxxxxxxx             |                            SAM007HM02