Hello,

Mike Parson wrote:

>They're loud, sound like a jet engine spinning up, and come to think
>of it, yeah probably like a dentist's drill when going full speed.  
>
Before I ever saw a data-center from the inside I always thought it 
would be quiet,
like a library. Ever since I've seen one, I've been deeply humbled by 
the amount of
noise professional equipment emits. ;)

>In their day, we put up with the noise, since they couldn't be beat for
>speed.  These days?  Hardly seems worth it. =)
>  
>
After watching Window Maker and depencies build - about three hours in 
total -
and turning off the machine afterwards, my ears hurt a little. I don't 
want to know
what it's like to sit there for a whole day... ;)
Like I said, I think I'll rip out the harddrive and boot over ethernet 
until I can find a
quiet replacement.
Since I got a second CPU with the machine which apparently works, too, I 
think I'll
install Solaris once for fun and then set up NetBSD 2.0 to boot over 
ethernet.
Now that I know it's a sun4m, the rest doesn't seem to be too hard.

Another thought just pops up in my mind - it's funny somehow that a machine
aimed at professional users "just works" like this, while PCs that aim 
for computer
illiterates often are painful to configure and need a lot of tweaking 
and sometimes
deep knowledge of the machines configuration.

Kind regards,
Benjamin