On Sun, Oct 03, 2010 at 03:48:32PM -0400, Alexandre Gauthier wrote:
> I would like to cast my vote for an Ultra 10 as well -- I have one as my
> DNS server. The main reason would be that it accepts commodity x86
> hardware (memory, hard drives, cdrom drive, VGA output), so spare parts
> aren't that difficult to find :)
Well, yes it does, but there are catches: The IDE controller is
notoriously slow (not even DMA, IIRC), which is one of the reasons why I
use(d) my U10s with SCSI-drives. The case is a nightmare - you have to
turn the whole thing upside down just to open it - very annoying in some
situations. And how they managed to make it that difficult just to swap
a HD is anyones guess... :-}
Also, there is at least one series of U510 motherboards that suffers
from "dying capacitor syndrome" - the buffer caps of the CPU will start
bulging and leaking and subsequently cease functioning, causing the
machine to become unstable. So far, I've had three of these motherboards
going bad, all the same revision. The slightly younger one I have in my
remaining U10 seems to have different caps - here's to hoping that they
last longer.
> Its power consumption is acceptable,
My experience: My U10/440 when I still used it as home firewall cum
server with 1xSCSI and 1xIDE was about 80W idle. Less than the U1 I was
using before but some 10W more than the dual PIII/600 I replaced it
with - which was also faster and less noisy.
*If* you go for an U10-like machine, I'd look at an AXi-based machine as
well - same CPUs, same memory, but UW-SCSI instead of IDE and the mobo
is ATX-formfactor => can be mounted in a case of your choice. For some
odd reasons, however, information about them is hard to come by - even
Sun seems to hide it...
Oh, and another data point: I did experiment with EIDE-controllers in
the U10 at some point (Promise ATA66 and ATA100) and that seemed to work
fine. At least OpenBSD didn't have a problem with that - you do need
another IDE drive to boot from, though.
Cheerio,
Thomas
--
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Thomas Ribbrock http://www.ribbrock.org/
"You have to live on the edge of reality - to make your dreams come true!"
