Re. stability. It has been my experience that by using mainstream boards
such as Dell PowerEdge, Non-bozo Compaq's, HP, or the "good"
motherboards (including the clone dual P-II/III boards) I have had
negligible problems. Yes, I have had the occasional dead system, dead
drive, network card or whatever but at about the same rate as from Sun,
HP, and even Dell. To be especially safe, you can restrict yourself to
the rather large list of tested/approved systems. I personally like to
avoid boards with onboard video/SCSI/network cards as they are a major
source of pain across ALL operating systems (including WinNT).
I have assumed that the basic stability problem arises from the
situation where a vendor doesn't check anything but WinNT and Win95/8.
If the board runs on these, it ships. This means that vendors who make
within-a-model changes (e.g. Intel) can result in your receiving a board
today that breaks while the one last week doesn't. I believe that
vendors testing their boards on e.g. Linux will tend to have systems
that work well under Solaris as well.
Linux and FreeBSD are in the hands of far more people than Solaris X_86
so if there IS a board compatibility problem, it tends to get
found/responded to/fixed faster for Linux/FreeBSD.
I have had personal and unsatisfactory experience with Intel's own
single and dual processor boards with onboard Intel network card and
Symbios SCSI. The quality of the boards are fine, but Intel keeps
changing BIOS's on the ProShare and Symbios to try and get them
somewhere close to 3Com+Adaptec (they aren't). My personal preference is
for rack-mount Compaq's (absolutely not their junk desktop line) for
management that insists on "major vendor" solutions and Dell systems (I
am mostly familiar with the 2- & 4-way systems but have run Solaris 2.6
and 2.7 on the smaller systems) for managers with better vision.
When one says "X crashes to often" it all depends on what is causing
THIS problem THIS time. The comments about new software versions is
exactly why we know and love Microsoft products if we get paid by the
hour.
Incidentally, although I really only deal with Solaris 2.6, Solaris 7
(aka 2.7) does install on a wider range of platforms.
Chiaki Ishikawa wrote:
>
> X-PMC-CI-e-mail-id: 11023
>
> >What I have heard Intel Solaris crashes too often. It means in future
>
> Well, with proper care (patching the serious problems using
> Sun's public available patches) and
> choosing the conservative hardware (conservative in the sense that
> the driver for it has been around at least more than 3 months or so,
> etc..) the solaris for x86 has been running rather stable at my office.
> For picking up hardware peripherals with well-supported drivers,
> checking newsgroup postings before purchase might help.
>
> Oh, of course, choose the stable hardware platform to begin with. No
> tweaking of the memory access time to gain the last 3-5% gain on
> speed, no overclocking, good cooling fan, reliable add-on memory
> modules, respectable motherboard brand, nothing blocking the power
> unit cooling fan's air flow, reliable power outlet (no surge), etc..
>
> If following the advise above, Solaris on Intel still crashes often on
> a given platform, I suspect that benchmark programs running under
> Windows can't be run reliably continuosly on the hardware also. My
> guess is that the hardware is flakey or the setup of the room is not
> suited for 24H/D,7D/W,365D/Y usage.
>
> As far as I can tell, there is NO intrinsic problem with Solaris for
> x86 if you follow the advice above.
>
> I have been running Solaris 2.4 for x86 for the last few years
> for web servers without many problems.
> Usually it stays up for three or four months until maintenace of the
> power supply of the building or some such necessity arises.
>
> The only hardware related problems were a couple of SCSI disks dying
> since the deployment began.
>
> On-going software security problems were dealt with
> as the CERT security bulletin or Sun's security notice came out with
> the publicly available patches, or home-brew solution based on the
> freely available tools such as bind 8.x, sendmail 8.y., etc..
>
> The PC is a Dell xm590 Pentium 90Mhz PC. True, it seems like a dinosaur
> in today's market, but works just fine.
> Dell's design of the chassis WITHOUT CPU cooling fan wins in this PC.
> Power-suppy unit fan is enough to cool the inside.
>
> I intend to use this PC until major component will break or the hits
> to the web server shots up through the roof.
> We just upgraded the BIOS for Y2K compliance :-)
>
> --
> Ishikawa, Chiaki [EMAIL PROTECTED] or
> (family name, given name) [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Personal Media Corp. ** Remove .NoSpam at the end before use **
> Shinagawa, Tokyo, Japan 142-0051
>
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--
Daemeon Reiydelle
Systems Engineer, Anthropomorphics Inc.
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