>> In a past life I was a sysadmin at a university site.  We had an
>> alpha which [had certain performance problems].
> Do you remember what kind of alpha this was?

Not in any useful sense, only that it had PCI slots for expansion and
was in a peecee-style tower case.  But (see below) I found records
making up for my lack of memory: the machine is (was) a 164LX 533.

> I just reactivated an PWS 433au to do exactly this job - acting as an
> amanda server in our institute and what you wrote sounds bad news to
> me ..

Well, it's entirely possible that your motherboard's chipset actually
works properly and you won't see any of the problems I did.

I did a little searching of the list archives.  The first message I
posted to port-alpha about it is archived at
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-alpha/2000/06/26/0004.html for your
reading enjoyment.  http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-alpha/2000/06/
includes pointers to some followups, but they rapidly veer off into
other alpha performance threads.

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