Hi,

you see that all from your point of view. Having some kind of Unix on 
the S/390 will probably be as useless for you than the ofppc port of 
NetBSD. But they exist, it shurely was some effort to do these 
ports, so someone shurely will benefit from them. There is no realk 
need to discuss that. 

On 7 Apr 2001, at 21:42, wojtek@3miasto.net wrote:

> it such case any of new small rack-mount servers do that job excellent

IIRC the S/390 has a manufacturer guaranteed 99.999% uptime. If 
one wants to get that for "any of the new RM servers" we are 
talking about lots of money. 

IIRC utilizing the S/390 crypto chip, the whole unix partition should 
be encrypted: not only the filesystem, but also memory and I/O (I 
do not remember if it was one of the NetBSd lists, where someone 
was interested in a encrypted fs). G._.Bush announced recently, 
that he will do *everything* to support US economy (even not to be 
conform to the Kyoto agreements) and given that with echelon or 
whatever US industry could have access to sensible data, such 
encryption sheme may be a necessity to companies. If one wanted 
to get that for the RM servers it will be costly.

The next point is the environments, where a S/390 allready exists. 
Giving them access to Unix will be more expensive with the RM 
servers or whatever (IIRC the S/390 are not known for their 
connectivity).

If you examine this intensively, you will find literally hundreds of 
situations, where the port of Unix to the S/390 makes sense or has 
an advantage over alternative solutions.

Last but not least, IBM announced the availability of linux on "all 
plattforms" some time ago. This has now come true (the AS/400 
port IIRC is now available), even if the only reason for it was, to 
show, that IBM keep their word. 

mike