🚀 go-pugleaf

> >> How fast is this machine, say relative to a 486DX class system?
> >
> >Disk and graphics are pretty slow by current standards, my 486 is
> >faster (with Linux) for many things. Not so portable, though.
> 
> I'd even describe my SB2 as sluggish.  Solaris tends to swap things out
> over time, so if you've left your machine sitting there idle, it'll
> take a while to get going again as it swaps your application(s) in.

We run a couple of SB3's as Ingres servers at remote sites where
transport and space limits make them ideal. They perform well,
but after upgrading to Solaris 2.5 and patching them up we
started running out of mbufs after ~30 days of uptime.
Memory and swap space were ok, but it suddenly started complaining
about not being able to allocate buffer space when someone pressed
a key on the console keyboard. Only Pause-R would bring it back.

After a lot of testing, I finally found that NCE is causing the
buffer leak. When I disabled NCE at boot the problem disappeared.

As they run as servers, we don't have any need for NCE.

> I'm also surprised nobody's mentioned the flakey keyboard yet (or is
> it just mine??).

I have seen flakey keyboards on SB1 and SB2. Our SB3's are ok
so far.

> And while I have some attention, has anyone managed to get one to boot
> over the Ethernet, using BOOTP for address assignment?  I hate typing
> those addresses by hand when experimenting.

I have booted them over ethernet like a normal Sun workstation,
using rarp and bootparams. In fact, I install the operating
system over the network using Sun's JumpStart. But I don't
think there is any support for dynamic address assignment,
if that's what you are looking for. Wait for Solaris 2.6.
If should have support for DHCP (both client and server).

-- 
Birger Wathne
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