Just a weird thought from a weird person (me). We've had lots of discussion here about the apparent lack of CPU horsepower on the zSeries compared to fast Intel box. What about having a super-fast Intel box running something like Hercules/390 (or FlexES). Run zLinux on the Intel. Do all the "maintenance" activities such as SRPM rebuilds and long compiles on that box. Reliability is not as big an issue for this, IMO. This would effectively off-load the heavy CPU zLinux maintenance from the zSeries so that it does not impact the production zLinux workload. And it would not cost all that much either. When completer, then use ftp or NFS to copy the updated files to the production zLinux system.
Or am I being too weird for words? <grin>. Granted, Hercules/390 on even a fast Intel is slow, so this is not good for emergency type work. I don't know how fast FlexES is or how much it costs. > -----Original Message----- > From: Post, Mark K [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: Friday, February 21, 2003 9:56 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: so correct me if I am wrong > > > Eric, > > It depends on how you define "current." Red Hat has put some > updates out there for their Linux/390 platforms, but not as > many has they have for their Intel ones. There was a thread > a little while back about the lack of security updates for > their Linux/390 platforms. > > Since they do put out the SRPMs (source RPMs), you can > download those and build the binary for installation, but > that can be, ummm, a chore, and it certainly chews up CPU > time for packages of any size. (I'm currently in the process > of re-building glibc 2.2.5, and it's going on 24 hours of > wall clock time. Open Office took me about a _month_, on a > much bigger machine that this one.) > > Mark Post
