Free Sun bash

[Jim Frost]

(This discussion doesn't really belong here so I've redirected
followups to comp.unix.wizards)

In article <657 at mace.cc.purdue.edu> mtr at mace.cc.purdue.edu (Miek Rowan) writes:
|I have a color Sun 3 in my office and it is just unacceptably slow.
|Especially if you want to use X11R2, but it carries on to Sunview
|also.  It can get so that scrolling is no better than 1200 baud dial
|up.  HP's color workstation is about 100 times faster, although they
|have thier own problems with networking.  

Hmm.  I use a Sun 2/120 with x11r2 and it's not "unacceptably slow"
for most things.  If you put xterm into "jump" mode you get good speed
on the scrolling.  Of course you can't read it then but most people
can't follow stuff running out at more than 4800 baud anyway; that's
why "more" is there.

On a Sun 3/50 x11r2 performance is much better, although still slow
for really intensive graphics applications.  This is mostly due to the
lack of a good x11 server for the sun.  A quote from the documentation
of the Sun server:

"The drivers are completely untuned and have inferior performance."

If someone got on the ball and tuned the server you'd see much better
performance, especially on the color systems (like yours) where the
server is *really* untuned.  I maintain that it's good enough to get
work done on, though.  If you want real performance I suggest using a
Sun 3/50 (or better a Sun 4/110) as a smart graphics terminal to
something like an Encore.  Yanking all the non-graphics stuff off the
Sun and putting it on a scream machine gives very nice performance and
is fairly transparent under x11; even my Sun 2 runs nicely when I
offload the application to a Silicon Graphics 4D.

It's true that Sun's are sometimes plagued with hardware problems, but
my experiences with their support were all favorable.  In addition
they understand that not all users are stupid and allow them to do
board swapping and the like, something that I appreciate.  I haven't
any experience with their newer machines (we have 2 Roadrunners and a
few Sun 4's coming, but nothing yet) so I can't comment on increasing
or decreasing reliability.  So far I've had one mono card blow up on
me, a disk problem, and a couple of mono screens have flipped out, but
Sun dealt with them quickly so I've no complaints.  I have no
idea just how long my Sun 2 has been around, but considering that it's
a Sun 2 I'd say that it's been awhile.

As for their software, it's a good and bad thing.  I *like* SunOS, at
least 3.5.  Some of the networking stuff -- like the yp server -- is
pretty hairy and not so reliable, but if you don't have a big network
you don't need it and it runs very cleanly.  NFS setup is simple and
very easily maintained.  Security is a problem but it ALWAYS is when
the user has direct access to the hardware, not one manufacturer can
say otherwise.  It still takes a little ingenuity to really screw
things up, to Sun's credit, and putting a password on single-user
boots really blocks up some holes that exist in 3.5.

In summary I don't think you've voiced a valid complaint.  There is
virtually nothing else that works as well as Sun workstations in their
price range.  386 PC's don't have anywhere near the networking support
that Sun's do, almost never have good support, and cost nearly as
much.  Higher-end workstations (eg Silicon Graphics) often address
these problems but they're for a more specific audience and cost a lot
more.

jim frost
madd at bu-it.bu.edu