$10000 worth of dogfood
My day job is developing Linux software for hp Itanium2 servers. I'm going to try using an hp zx6000 as my workstation.
Initial impressions: (strictly my personal opinion):
The hardware is very tidy indeed. Clearly a lot of thought went into the mechanical design.
The machines have really neat manageability support: an onboard service processor so that you can get to the bootup and OS console over the lan and similar tricks.
Sadly the firmware support for this is less friendly than it might be. I think everyone who has tried to install such a machine has had the experience of the machine hanging at bootup... except it's not really hung, it's just talking to the wrong console port. Once you find and follow the right instructions it's fine. (Installing Linux on hp Itanium 2-based Servers and Workstations may be the right one, or you may find an update on hp.com.)
It's very quick. I have not run it back to back against a brand-new top-end Xeon or Opteron but it's much faster than most PCs.
My unit has a FireGL card, which seems to have only binary drivers, which is a pain if you need to run anything but the specified redhat release.
Thank goodness for Debian. Having a single system which is freely available and nearly the same across different hardware is great.
posted Fri 13 Aug 2004 in /computers/hardware/zx6000 | link
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