On Tuesday 29 December 2009 18:11:51 John R Pierce wrote:
Slack-Moehrle wrote:
My 12 year old wants to learn more about servers and has memorized a lot of commands like ls, chmod, du, etc. He wants to have his own domain and server on the web and I have enough Static IP's, so why not foster this interest.
I have an old ultra sparc 5. Are there any CentOS versions that support Sparc?
the Ultra 5 (and its cousin the Ultra 10) is penalized by having a programmed IO IDE channel which can transfer a max 6MB/sec at 100% CPU bound.
some technical details here, http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/validateUser.do?target=Systems/U5/U5&am... ource= http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/validateUser.do?target=Systems/U5/U5 &source=
Its supported by Solaris 10 but with a max of 512MB ram, you're not going to get very far with ZFS.
best thing you can do with those is get a LSI Logic/Symbios SCSI card (gotta be 5V 33Mhz 32bit PCI card such as the 53C875 or '876), and use a SCSI disk, this gets away from the PIO performance bottleneck, and should be supported by the openboot rom as-is. if you remove the floppy drive, you can get two HD's into a U5 chassis.
That's a good suggestion, even old scsi drives are much faster than the ide disks and controller used in the Ultra5. Unfortunately we had some issues running two 7200rpm SCSI disks in a U5 - the poor little box would overheat.
Peter.