[HECnet] So who's looking forward to all the cheap second-hand Itanium gear that will soon be flooding the market?

[Mark Benson]

On 5 Jul 2011, at 16:12, Mark Wickens <mark at wickensonline.co.uk> wrote:

ZX6000 were primarily Windows server workstations - they didn't ever really fit a defined niche as far as I can tell.

Not exclusively though. Mine ran HP-UX in it's former life. It used to be a CAD/CAM workstation for Honda F1 (according to it's asset tag) and the EFI boot menu still had the entry in for HP-UX.

I bought mine about 4 years ago for GBP 500 which was as much as I was prepared to pay at the time. They are going now for around GBP 100 depending on the configuration.

Mine cost me 125 with no PSU or disks but 24GB of RAM. I reckon the recyclers sold the PSUs on to the place I bought mine from (better profit that way I suspect) who charged another 70-odd. In all it cost 235 GBP which I didn't think was at all bad. It's in clean nick and runs very quietly.

FWIW I couldn't find a comparable machine UK or USA for under 200 GBP - that excluded any rx2600s as they are way louder.

Mine was maxed out with memory and came with drives, so I guess that's worth something.

My only stumbling block is mine has a pair of battered old IBM SCA 18GB disks. I didn't have anything bigger I could stand being in the room with :)

Luckily they still run OpenVMS, otherwise your options are very limited - various linux flavours sort of work, but I believe gentoo is the only one still currently being maintained.

Debian Squeeze (6.0) runs on IA64 but it got a monk on with my ATi FireGL card and refused to work Xorg with it.

There is always HP-UX 11i but finding that for Itanium is a major mission, or costs more than the machine.

I know the hardware is not the greatest, but it's a shame it hasn't been better supported, given that it is a true 64 bit architecture.

Thong is I can't see much wrong with it apart from being power hungry and running hot but hey when's that ever worried people who run DEC gear :D

I like the EFI firmware although it's not on the same plateu as OpenFirmware on IBM and Sun gear, and I like that it's a pure 64-bit architecture without all the x86_64 shenanigans.

But then, what do I know... I just love anything that is different or esoteric - which firmly makes me *not* the man in the street.

Are any of us on this list? ;)

-- 
Mark Benson

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