Re: Solaris and Linux comparison

From: Greg Menke (gregm-news_at_toadmail.com)
Date: 12/25/03 

Date: 25 Dec 2003 13:21:28 -0500

Paul Eggert <eggert@twinsun.com> writes:

> At 24 Dec 2003 23:44:32 -0500, Greg Menke <gregm-news@toadmail.com> writes:
>
> > There is no way to get reliability- I mean long-term, 10 years later
> > on the same box kind of reliablity without paying for it.
>
> I don't care about 10-year reliability, and you shouldn't either.
> Every last bit of Sun gear that I bought 10 years ago has been shut
> off permanently.

Oh so you really know all about what my needs are?

>
> I do care about reliability; that's why I order working ECC memory
> even for my PC desktops. Cosmic-ray-induced soft DRAM errors are a
> gotcha if you're running a relatively reliable operating system and if
> your box isn't deep underground.

So you don't have memory errors but the motherboard craps out or the
power supply nukes the works. BFD. ECC is a small part of the
puzzle.

> While we're on the subject of reliability, Dell and Sun both have
> Chipkill ECC (a RAID-like scheme for DRAM) in their rackmount x86
> servers, and Fujitsu-Siemans has Chipkill-like technology in its
> PRIMEPOWER SPARC Solaris servers, but as far as I know Sun doesn't
> have anything like it in its SPARC servers, and this leads me to
> wonder about how reliable Sun's SPARC servers really are in surviving
> DRAM faults.

Last I checked, the Dell salespeople don't know what MTBF means- and
can't even quote it off the brochures for the components they buy. I
mean literally- they had no idea what the term meant.

> > But you have to consider what you get inside your Dell box. Remember,
> > its hardware built and sold with the finest of razor thin margins, so
> > the hardware is as cheap as it can possibly be and still work long
> > enough to make its warranty.
>
> Oh, absolutely. And sometimes it doesn't even make its warranty. The
> last cheap Dell server that I bought had a disk failure soon after
> installation. It was an IDE drive, of course. The failure was soft:
> the drive had too many read errors but they could be retried.
>
> The server had two drives so I could limp along with one. Dell wanted
> to send a repair person to my site to replace the bad drive; this
> level of service is bundled into the circa $380 price I paid for the
> server. (I asked them not to bother, as I preferred to hack on the
> box myself; but still, they would have done it.)

Last Dell box I got has some kind of motherboard bug that leads to
lockups in NT and Linux- the hard disks are fine. The case is crap,
floppy plastic all over the place. Stupid plastic locking bar to hold
in the cards instead of screws- had to rip that p.o.s out on day 1 so
I could put in the other lan boards. How much cheapo crap do you need
to have in a box before the whole thing becomes cheapo crap?

>From the things I've seen done by Dell techs, it will be a cold day in
hell before I ever have one near any of my systems. If I need tech
support, I'll pay some Linux/BSD-aware college puke to do it.
 
> I'm afraid Sun doesn't offer that kind of service if you pay $1000 for
> their cheapest web server. I've bought Sun's cheap servers, and had
> them fail on me: I know that hardware failures aren't limited to Dell.

I think your problem is you're buying web servers and judging
everyones needs on the basis of disposable technology for disposable
applications. Step up to big, troublesome, complicated data
processing that has to run for years and years and then start telling
me about how great Dell hardware is.

I'm aware that Sun hardware fails too- but I have lots more Ultra 1's
and Sparcstations around doing stuff than Dell boxes of equivalent
vintage.

Gregm

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