Date: Mon, 1 Feb 93 09:32:50 EST From: Dwight D. McKay (The Moderator) Reply-To: Suns-at-Home@orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V6 #5 To: Suns-at-Home-List Suns-at-Home Digest Mon, 1 Feb 93 Volume 6 : Issue 5 Today's Topics: ELC at home Sun3/50 at home : UPS, SPS, and line conditioner recommendations Suns-at-Home Digest V6 #4 +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Submissions: suns-at-home \ @orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu | | Requests: suns-at-home-request > -- or -- | | Archives: suns-at-home-archives / ...rutgers!pur-ee!... | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1993 01:33:04 +1030 From: simon@internode.com.au (Simon Hackett) Subject: ELC at home To: Suns-at-Home@ecn.purdue.edu > Date: Tue, 19 Jan 1993 15:07:44 -0500 (EST) > From: Nico Tjandra > Subject: ELC at home > To: Suns-at-Home@orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu You'll get respectable performance in 8mb if you throw openwindows (a.k.a. BrokenWindows) away and run X11R4 or R5 instead. That's all we run on my Sun systems here. Check with a local friendly university and get a copy of R4 or R5 for sparc's already built as binaries, to save yourself the bother of building it yourself, and put that on your system. Probably takes up less disk space, too... Otherwise, the only sensible increment up from 8mb (16mb) will help a _lot_ (and will let you do more work running X as well, but X will _always_ let you do more work than OW, which is just amazingly resource hungry, both in cpu and memory. If you can afford it, a nice thing to do is make most of your memory problems go away for good and buy a 16mb SIMM for the ELC. I run my main ELC server with a 16mb SIMM added to the base 8mb of ram (total of 24mb). Most of the time, the machine has enough free memory that it's hardly page faulting. Oh yes - if you want to find out how much memory you need to make your current memory starvation problems go away (i.e. whether 16mb total is enough or you need more), try "pstat -s". This tells you how much swap space is in use at present, which is a pretty good match to how much physical memory you'd want to have, ideally, to pretty much eleminate page faulting. Also, beware that some versions of X servers and other similar things have memory leaks in them which mean that the total virtual size of the server grows over time. Again "pstat -s" and tools like "top" are great to check on this. Another quick test is to see if your windowed system, after being up for a few days, seems slower than it was when you first started it up - see if "pstat -s" shows you a much increased swap space usage over time. Of course, if you run up more apps over time, that'll increase the swap space usage as well! Cheers, Simon Hackett Internode Systems Pty Ltd Adelaide, Australia simon@internode.com.au ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 28 Jan 93 19:34:41 EST From: Jonathan Hardwick Subject: Sun3/50 at home : UPS, SPS, and line conditioner recommendations To: suns-at-home@orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu This is a repeat of an article I posted on comp.sys.sun.hardware and comp.sys.sun.misc. I'm not sure what the overlap is between those and the suns-at-home list, but I'm passing the information along, just in case anyone finds it helpful: Here's a summary of the responses I got to the following question: > 1. What are the power requirements of my Sun 3/50 and its monochrome > screen? (I know how much the Quantum drive draws) It came > without docs, so I'm in the dark here. Under 250W? 450W? 600W? > 2. How sensitive is the Sun power supply to fluctuations in the > supply? I can remember an office glitch in which two IBM RT's > went castors-up whilst a Sun3/60 never even blinked. Are Sun's > generally good in this respect? > 3. Is the extra expense of a UPS/SPS worth it? In other words, how > often *is* there a blackout which a line conditioner can't handle > but a UPS can? > 4. Does anyone have (dis)recommendations? Tripplite line > conditioners score highly in Eric Raymond's 386-workstation FAQ. > From a quick look through catalogs, there are also Sola UPSs > out there. Which other manufacturers should I be considering? > Ability to be interfaced to the system is a plus. First, my thanks go to Jay Rouman, Andrew Burnette, Jeff Aldrich, Y. Tsuji, Anthony Datri, Kevin Cosgrove, Scott Gordon and Peter Wargo for their advice and experiences. 1. As someone kindly pointed out to me, "look on the back of the box!". Whoops. Anyway, there's a 4A 110V fuse back there, so it shouldn't take more than 440 VA even at startup. We have a known-working datapoint of a Sun3/50 system running on a 450 VA SPS, and drawing 1.8A when idle -- so a 400 VA SPS (which is cheaper) should be ok, as long as you're not overloading the Sun with eg 8M of RAM. 2. Sun power supplies are generally supposed to be good; they'll live through power fluctuations that would crash other machines. Note that surges that the motherboard will live through are still bad for monitors, so a line conditioner (or better) might be a good idea... 3. There were two separate camps : "Suns are cheap and tough, so live dangerously", vs "I've never used anything less than a UPS/SPS since x happened", for various x :-) 4. Tripp-Lite, American Power Corporation, and Best products were all recommended by name. It's easy to find mail-order houses selling Tripp-Lite and APC stuff in any issue of eg Computer Shopper, and the two companies seem to be competing on price and features (good news for us!). Best products are tougher to find, and seems more expensive, but got good reviews. I'll e-mail an edited copy of the responses I got to anyone who's interested. Jonathan H. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 17:53:28 -0500 (EST) From: "Anthony A. Datri" Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V6 #4 To: Suns-at-Home@ecn.purdue.edu Re: CD-ROM on a Sun 3 >I am considering getting a CDROM for my Sun 3/110. I would like to hear >Will it work ? It should. Sun doesn't officially "support" CD-ROM drives on 3's, but I've personally used one on a 3/80, and have read of others use one on a 3/180. Re: ELC at home >. Right now it does continues paging especially >for openwindows which degrades performance Dump OW and run normal X11R5 with the XsunMono server. Your performance will improve dramatically. Adding another 8 meg would also improve your performance a good bit -- after that you'll have diminishing returns on additional memory unless you're running lots of big stuff. Memory is *cheap* these days, though. > The next question would be >what type of personal productivity (wordprocessor, spreadsheets, etc) >softwares would be recomended for suns-at-home, if budget is constrained For document prep, you can get the FSF's groff if you're a troff type, or use TeX. Both are free. You can also use ez from the Andrew ToolKit, which is free. The FSF has a free X-based spreadsheet named Oleo, but I don't know how well it works. Re: SMD Disk Question >Will my controller handle three disks? Thanks... I think I responded to this when it was posted. A simple modification of the kernel config file does the trick, although you won't be singing about the performance. Be glad that you don't have an xy450, at least 8^) They didn't interleave seeks. ------------------------------ End of Suns-at-Home Digest ******************************