[TriLUG] BIND 4 Help & OpenBSD on Sparc

Chris Hedemark chris at yonderway.com
Sun Apr 7 12:20:49 EDT 2002


On Sun, 2002-04-07 at 03:06, Bill Vinson wrote:

> Well, in addition the Linux kernel is supposed to have memory managment 
> issues on the Sun-4C systems which renders it much slower than it should 
> be.  Seems BSDs are best for this class of system.

The only sparc I have right now is an UltraSPARC IIi 333MHz so I'm not
well exposed to the world of Linux-on-Sparc issues.  I had Red Hat 6.2
working on my Ultra 5 which initially worked GREAT.  I was very
impressed.  And it ran much faster than Solaris 8 did on the same
hardware.

The problem I had was with compiling anything.  I don't know if 90% of
what is out there is intended mainly for x86 and not tested on sparc but
I would download source rpm's and try to build binary packages and they
would bomb out.

> My only problem is now that I have had some time with this sparc, I want 
> more.  At least one or two more.  I love this thing.  Maybe a SPARC 10, 
> a 5, or a 20.  Then maybe graduate up to an Ultra somewhere down the 
> line.  

I've never felt the draw towards older sparcs, but that's probably
because most of my work has been with UltraSPARC hardware and I'd be
disappointed with anything less probably.  I picked up this Ultra 5 on
eBay for about $400 and I have been VERY pleased with it thus far. 
About the only hardware change I made was upgrading from a 9GB drive to
20GB, but the CD-ROM drive is slow (I bet it is about 8x) so the will be
upgraded as well.  Maybe even to a CD-R.

Now I would very much like to have a few more Ultra 5 boxes around.  It
is kind of a pain to jump from OS to OS to OS on this one box.  Part of
the appeal of x86 hardware is that if I need another box to try another
OS, I just run down in the basement and grab another.  I don't know
where these resellers are getting whole pallets of used Ultra 5's that
you see photos of on eBay but I'd love to get in on one of those salvage
deals locally sometime.

> I'm even thinking about getting into Solaris (No! ;) 

That was my justification for buying the Ultra 5 in the first place.  I
do run Solaris on it most of the time so I can keep up on my skills for
professional reasons.

> and maybe an 
> SGI Indigo or Octane.  

SGI is on the wish list for me but further down.  I'd have a much easier
time of justifying an RS/6000 right now.  I also have a couple of older
HP-PARISC machines but the main problem there is that none of the free
OS's seem to be mature on this platform, and I don't have HP-UX 11
install media so I don't feel save blowing these guys away to experiment
with something else.

One other thing I'd love to get my hands on sometime is one of those
"S/390 on a PCI card" systems.  I think there could be a great future
for Linux on S/390 but I think one of the things IBM needs to do is get
S/390 hardware in the hands of Linux professionals so we can get more
excited about it and feel more confident recommending the mainframe
route to management types.  Right now if IBM walked in pitching Linux on
the mainframe I'd be curious enough to hear the pitch and see the demo
but it is way too different from the way I'm used to working and it
would be a difficult sell for that reason.

> I have caught the restoration bug big time and 
> will probably be avoiding x86 hardware for some time.  This is going to 
> be really bad for my budget :)

Check out eBay.  If you're willing to do non-sparc hardware there are
some great deals there.  Heck there are even great deals on early sparc
hardware.  UltraSPARC and RS/6000 hardware still seems to be expensive,
mostly due to guys like us looking to work at home with the stuff we
work with at the office.  Unfortunately the snipers on eBay have made it
more difficult to get a good deal but one can still be had from time to
time.

> Not sure if I am familiar with how 
> you are trying to install?

If you go to the OpenBSD ftp site to where the floppy disk images are
kept, you'll see a file called "miniroot.fs".  The idea is you "dd" that
on top of your swap partition, and tell the Sun's PROM to boot from that
partition (i.e. "boot disk:b bsd") which will then boot the OpenBSD
installer from that miniroot partition.  You could just as easily put
the miniroot on a CD-R which is what I'm going to try next time, as
using the swap partition is screwing up my disk label pretty badly. 
I've now got a 9GB drive that the Ultra 5 thinks is a 640MB drive.

Miniroot is just slightly too big to put on a floppy (about 200K too
big).

The regular boot floppies only work on SBUS systems and the Ultra 5 is a
PCI bus system so the boot floppy won't work on my box.

[snip]
> SOA record, but it was merely a line wrap in their example.  After I 
> removed the return and got the first part of the SOA on one line it 
> worked perfectly...

Oh cool glad it's working.

I love watching the script kiddies trying to hit a BIND 4 box (the
OpenBSD version that is) and not getting anywhere.  It can be very
entertaining sometimes.  More recently they seem to be obsessed with
OpenSSH.

-- 
***********************************************************
| Rev. Chris Hedemark, DD
| Hillsborough, NC
| http://yonderway.com
| GPG Public Key - http://yonderway.com/chris/hedemark.gpg
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