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Europa's Sun Sanctuary



Home:UNIX and Servers

These are the computers that operate my network infrastructure, as well as any Unix machines that aren't Sun. While my main focus is Sun machines (see my Sun page for more info), I do also focus on Unix as a whole as well.


Systems

Mac Mini G4 (Early 2005) - "Melchior"
Year: 2005
CPU: PowerPC 7447A (G4) @ 1.42GHz
RAM: 1GB
Graphics: ATI Radeon 9200
Hard Drive: 160GB ATA HDD
OS: OpenBSD 7.6

IBM System x3250 - "Balthasar-2"
Year: 2006
CPU: Intel Xeon 3050 @ 2.13GHz
RAM: 2GB
Graphics: ATI RN50b
Hard Drive: 2x160GB SATA HDD (Striped)
OS: Solaris 10

IBM RS/6000 44P Model 170 - "Keine"
Year: 2000
CPU: IBM POWER3-II @ 333MHz
RAM: 2GB
Graphics: None
Hard Drive: 3x18GB UltraSCSI HDD
OS: AIX 5.3

 

 

My Mac Mini G4 (Melchior) runs OpenBSD and is responsible for routing, DHCP, and DNS for my network, and runs it quite well. It also hosts a basic intranet website, and, because it runs DHCP, it is also what directs network boot clients to Balthasar-2. Balthasar-2 runs Solaris 10, and hosts files necessary for PXE boot, and Sun Jumpstart, as well as the boot files necessary for booting OpenFirmware Macs over the network from the OpenFirmware prompt.

The RS/6000 44P/170 is the first RS/6000 machine I have owned and has been quite a learning experience, given that IBM has a somewhat specific way of expecting machines to be configured on a network and within their ecosystem. I have run a Minecraft server on it as a test of its abilities, and I would like to benchmark it comparative to my 333MHz Sun Ultra 5 and my Power Mac G4, as a machine of a different architecture at the same clock speed and a machine of a similar architecture at just over 2x the clock speed.

The IBM PS/ValuePoint is my first pre-Pentium machine, and I took the opportunity to install an old version of Unix (Interactive UNIX 4.1, which is based on System V/386 Revision 3.2) on it. I have yet to do much with it given I don't presently have a complete set of compilation tools (as and ld are missing), but I do want to see just what it is capable of, and it might be interesting to compare to my SPARCstation 5, which is of a similar clock speed and vintage, albeit of a different architecture and running SVR4 instead of SVR3.2). Since then, I elected to instead install Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on it, as I feel like it is better suited to being a "commodity" machine that is used to communicate with more specialized systems, rather than a specialized system itself.