Michael Sokolov wrote:
> 
>    Jacob H. Suter <jsuter@intrastar.net> wrote:
> > fascist system administration is a sign of a shitty system
> > administrator, usually scared out of his wits.
> 
>    This is indeed a good description of INS.

Thats always fun :)

> > Its all in the expense and hassle of operation.  Vaxes are old, at least
> > any that you or I can reasonably afford of any speed.  They'll probably
> > run until the next ice age, but they cost a fortune to operate (just my
> > VS3100 eats a huge amount of power, at least 1.5A@120V) [...]
> 
>    Old VAXen are not as fast as new Pentiums and SPARCs, but a farm of the
> former can match one of the latter. The cost of power is not a
> consideration for me, since it's not my money, nor that of our department.
> It's the University's general budget from which everyone happily sucks. I
> also don't considered running a VAX "cluster" a hassle, on the opposite, I
> enjoy it greatly.

Very true.  The problem is with farms is that one thing goes down, its
broken.  Lets say your central NFS server for /home and /var/mail
die...  You're screwed.  
 
> > [...] the
> > availability of spare parts can be sparse and may take days/weeks to
> > find.
> 
>    This is true unfortunately. If something breaks on my system, I'll have
> a beg my sponsors for some $$$ to replace it. My hope is that by that time
> I'll have too many users for them to refuse. There is also an issue as to
> whether it's better to buy a replacement for a broken VAX part or to move
> to "new" crap. Here my hope is that I'll have too many machines for the
> latter approach to be affordable (of course a downgrade is never an
> option).

Well "new crap" isn't that bad of a thing.  Forcing a school full of
people to use outdated stuff is pretty shitty IMHO.  Students *do* pay
for proper Internet access. 
 
> > You can like playing with old hardware or possibly even like old
> > arpanet, but I would think most people actually like what the internet
> > has come to technically, but not the people (lusers) that have taken it
> > over.
> 
>    Well, I agree in a sense. However, having the net restricted to ARPA and
> major campuses would help keep those losers out.

Ahh, it was just a different class of luser...  :)

JS

PS - I love playing with old hardware, but I sure as hell wouldn't trade
my 6x86/P166+ loaded nicely (40mb ram, 2.45gb total HD, CD-R drive, 4mb
S3 Virge, etc) for a Vax...  How could I play my mp3's? :)