M
Michael Brown
This kinda proves the point - you don't have to have
all-(INTC|AMD|NVDA|insert your favorite vendor here) system to have a
certain level of stability.
Yet I would not rely on the server you described for any
mission-critical (or simply important enough) application.
Heck, neither would I. If my job depended on the system being up I'd pretty
much start again from scratch As it is, if the server fell over, pretty
much noone would care about waiting a few hours till I got home and fixed
it.
And again,
the workload you describe is not exactly stressful. Ever tried that
system for something that is both CPU and IO - intence?
CPU intensive is easy: we're talking about a K6/2-400 here remember A VNC
session often pins the CPU to max with a bit of HDD activity, and burning a
CD at 52x gets it up to about 80% CPU usage on the outer edge of the CD (and
is obviously hitting the I/O subsustem pretty hard). And there's a virus
scan and tripwire scan that runs every week (both max out the CPU and hit
the disk pretty hard). But it's not under continual high load, no.
But then,
again, a compact car has no towing capability to speak of, but for
pizza delivery it's just the right thing, be it Honda Civic, or Toyota
Corolla, or even (gulp!) Chevy Metro.
Absolutely. I've probably rebuilt a dozen or so "ancient" computers ranging
from 486/100's up to the K6/2. Most have been given away to friends and
ended up in a cupboard somewhere running Linux with things like a DHCP
server, squid, etc. The only one that I know of that has had problems is a
486/100 that was powerd down to be moved and never powered back up again
(either motherboard or CPU died, didn't investigate too much due to the lack
of similar a motherboard or CPU). They handle the job nicely and don't cost
anything but time to make; even a low-end Duron/Celeron/C3 is complete
overkill for these sort of duties. But they're obviously not suited to
running anything too important or complex.