Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!husc6!rice!sun-spots-request
From: munnari!natmlab.dms.oz.au!ronb@uunet.uu.net (Ron Baxter)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun
Subject: Information sought on Solbourne Computers
Message-ID: <4285@natmlab.dms.oz>
Date: 27 Jan 89 16:31:38 GMT
Sender: usenet@rice.edu
Organization: CSIRO Maths and Stats & Applied Physics, Sydney, Australia
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Approved: Sun-Spots@rice.edu
Original-Date: 19 Jan 89 15:00:21 GMT
X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 7, Issue 125, message 6 of 16

We have a Sun3/160 fileserver with diskless nodes, VDU's and communication
lines.  It is overloaded and we are looking to upgrade it -- possibly to a
Sun 4/260 that is well endowed with memory and disk capacity.

However, we have just seem some specs for this Solbourne Computer (just
announced, I believe) which has a Fujitsu SPARC CPU together with
SunOS/SunView/NeWS etc licensed from Sun.  So it looks like an
alternative.

Now we KNOW that the 4/260 would slot into our system with minimal
upheaval, and we would expect to be able to deal with any problems that
arise.

My apprehension about the Solbourne is that maybe not everything works
smoothly yet, or there may be some compatability problems with our
existing equipment, or that some of the application software we take for
granted may not go without a lot of pain, etc, etc.  (For instance, the
glossy doesn not mention availability of serial lines other than the 2
that are there, but we need to support several dialin/dialout modems.)

So if anyone has investigated it, or had hands on experience, or stories
to tell that may allay my fears (or reinforce them) I would be very
grateful for the information.

Thanks, and I will summarize anything I get.
-- 
Ron Baxter, CSIRO Div Maths & Stats,
PO Box 218, Lindfield, NSW, Australia.
Phone:	+61 2 467 6059		
Email:	ronb@natmlab.oz.au