Hi all, There's been talk about what's going on with murphy recently, and, we're not quite sure yet, so figured this'd be a good place to discuss it. At the moment, it's sitting there idle, with Solaris 10 installed. Linux was taken off it for a number of reasons.. * It seems to be exhibiting kernel bugs (random system freezes for absolutely no reason. Unaccessable via SSH or serial console/ALOM). * We (redbrick) seemed to be the only people anywhere actually using Linux on a production T2000. This worries us greatly, as it means vendors are unlikely to put too much time into fixing bugs. * A number of bits of software were known to be buggy, and we had some of them patched ourselves. (For example, libmysqlclient15off) * Ubuntu 8.04 doesn't support SPARC at all, which kinda ties back into the second point. People aren't interested in supporting it. Debian has a SPARC port that apparently supports a Niagara CPU, but there seems to be nobody (like, absolutely nobody, anywhere) using it in production. I only came across one reference to one guy using it in testing. For a morning's worth of googling, this isn't encouraging. * Gentoo (who seem to have the biggest Niagara uptake of all of the linuxes) makes admins break out in a cold sweat at the very mention of it's name. (I quite like gentoo as it happens, but I'm weird) Anyway, that's why we think Linux is a bad idea (tm). Unfortunately, that leaves us with Solaris as our only real option. One or two of the BSDs support Niagara, but they seem to be even less mature then linux. We've installed it on a test basis, to see how it goes really. We're considering breaking it into multiple LDOMs - logical Solaris domains, which are kinda like Xen virtual machines, only with Sun logos everywhere. See here for more info: http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hubs/ldoms/ And here for a fancy PDF about them (even has pictures): http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0207/820-0832.pdf An idea is that we'd have a bigish LDOM for logins and apache (because we want users to be able to log into the WWW machine), another for MySQL, another for secondary LDAP, and another for maybe jakarta/tomcat/glassfish/whatever java webapp server we end up using. The LDAP and MySQL ones would obviously be smaller than the Apache and login one. The main benefit of this is security, really. Of course it means remembering 4 more root passwords, but that's a minor issue :) That's all really. Anyone have any feedback? We're completely open to suggestions on this, nothing has been decided with murphy at this point. -Andrew -- RedBrick/Gamessoc/Filmsoc Webmaster 08/09