sun server e250

[otake-tux]

I have the opportunity to acquire a sun e 250 server. have any of you had experiences with it? would it be a nice thing to have for personal home development and such?

I just want some opinions; not a lot of people to talk to about these kinds of things...

[netztier]

I have the opportunity to acquire a sun e 250 server. have any of you had experiences with it? would it be a nice thing to have for personal home development and such?


Slow (2x 400MHz UltraSparc II at best), large, heavy, noisy, power-hungry and still not cheap if you want to add more storage capacity (where 80pin SCA SCSI Disks are basically the only valid option).

AFAIK, It lacks an UPA graphics slot, so you can't add Elite3D or Creator3D cards (which are supported by Linux, but don't offer any hardware acceleration), so using it as a workstation might not be the most clever idea.

But: it keeps your feet warm, so get one! :-)

To be honest: it can make a nice small-scale server to host your mail, file, web site and things like that - but performance-wise, you won't see it rush past your 1,6Ghz P4 standard PC from four years ago. Ok - having SCSI disks and it's good I/O architecture could make some difference over the PCs shabby IDE disks - but not in orders of magnitude.


regards

Marc

[otake-tux]

it will not be used for regular desktop use. X will no run on this box :)

this will be my personal test server for services I offer professionally. I'll use it to build ldap, mail servers, tinker with security apps like metasploit, perl scrypting for sys administration; that kind of thing.

[otake-tux]

just wanted to let you know dapper runs flawlessly on this machine. I don't run a gui on it but the raptor gfx is supported enough to give me a prompt and the sun keyboard works great. good machine to run dapper on.

[burnz]

Can I install Ubuntu 8.04 into E250 machine? Or have anyone test it using Ubuntu 8.04?

Thanks.