SEO

Morning,
I'm looking for justification for keeping my SunBlade desktop instead
of only having a Windows PC to do my administration work from.

I currently have a Windows laptop that I use with a docking station at
work and carry with me for on-call activities. I also have a SunBlade
1000 on my desk which I use for day-to-day activities and to run
overnight and long jobs that I can't run on the laptop because I take
it home at night.

Unless I can come up with some good justifictions, my company is
wanting to take away my Solaris desktop and have me only use my
laptop. I'd rather just keep my Sun Blade and turn in my laptop.

My company runs Citrix, so accessing the company Windows environment
on my SunBlade is easy. I'm not missing a thing without the laptop.

Any input from other Sysadmins for justification for keeping my
SunBlade?

martha.crocker@sanantonio.gov < martha.crocker@sanantonio.gov> wrote:

> Any input from other Sysadmins for justification for keeping my
> SunBlade?

Can you install something like Cygwin on your Windows system? Or
VNC on both Windows and Unix servers? if so, you can easily login
with X/VNC from Windows to Unix. If you just need to be able to
run long running tasks on a text terminal, you might want to have
a look at screen.

BR,

Alexander Skwar

On 2007-08-13, martha.crocker@sanantonio.gov <martha.crocker@sanantonio.gov> wrote:

> Any input from other Sysadmins for justification for keeping my
> SunBlade?

Do you have any other test environments? I find having a Blade 2000 enormously
useful when I want to test something, possibly fatal, to the box. You can't do
that unless you've got physical access.


--
"Religion poisons everything."
[email me at huge {at} huge (dot) org <dot> uk]

martha.crocker@sanantonio.gov wrote:
> Morning,
> I'm looking for justification for keeping my SunBlade desktop instead
> of only having a Windows PC to do my administration work from.
>
> I currently have a Windows laptop that I use with a docking station at
> work and carry with me for on-call activities. I also have a SunBlade
> 1000 on my desk which I use for day-to-day activities and to run
> overnight and long jobs that I can't run on the laptop because I take
> it home at night.
>
> Unless I can come up with some good justifictions, my company is
> wanting to take away my Solaris desktop and have me only use my
> laptop. I'd rather just keep my Sun Blade and turn in my laptop.

Screen size, and keyboard size are two i can think of. Even if you add
an external monitor to a laptop, the resolution will be lower than the
blade I expect.

You might find something on the web about health issues with small
keyboards.

Reliability of disks - MTBF of a SCSI disk would (I suspect, see
manufacturers web sites), be greater than a laptop, especially given the
environment is harsher for a laptop.

You can keep confidential data on the machine at the fixed secure
location, rather than a laptop, which have a habit of being stolen.

You don't say what hardware you administer, but if it it SPARC, it would
be useful to run a SPARC binary on a test machine without risking
upsetting the company network.

Does the Blade have Gbit ethernet - does the laptop?

I suspect other might think of other justifications.

Does the blade have 2 CPUs? Code sometimes behaves differently on 2 CPUs.

Dave <someplace@nowhere-nice.com> writes:

>martha.crocker@sanantonio.gov wrote:
>> Morning,
>> I'm looking for justification for keeping my SunBlade desktop instead
>> of only having a Windows PC to do my administration work from.
>>
>> I currently have a Windows laptop that I use with a docking station at
>> work and carry with me for on-call activities. I also have a SunBlade
>> 1000 on my desk which I use for day-to-day activities and to run
>> overnight and long jobs that I can't run on the laptop because I take
>> it home at night.
>>
>> Unless I can come up with some good justifictions, my company is
>> wanting to take away my Solaris desktop and have me only use my
>> laptop. I'd rather just keep my Sun Blade and turn in my laptop.

>Screen size, and keyboard size are two i can think of. Even if you add
>an external monitor to a laptop, the resolution will be lower than the
>blade I expect.

>You might find something on the web about health issues with small
>keyboards.

>Reliability of disks - MTBF of a SCSI disk would (I suspect, see
>manufacturers web sites), be greater than a laptop, especially given the
>environment is harsher for a laptop.

>You can keep confidential data on the machine at the fixed secure
>location, rather than a laptop, which have a habit of being stolen.

>You don't say what hardware you administer, but if it it SPARC, it would
>be useful to run a SPARC binary on a test machine without risking
>upsetting the company network.

>Does the Blade have Gbit ethernet - does the laptop?

>I suspect other might think of other justifications.

>Does the blade have 2 CPUs? Code sometimes behaves differently on 2 CPUs.

The main justification, at least for me, is the drastically improved
productivity. In my current job I was stuck with nothing but a Windoze
laptop for the first month or so. It cost me at least an hour a day
(likely more) in lost productivity by having to deal with Windoze dreadful
UI. It doesn't take very long to pay for itself.

--
Michael T Pins
mtpins@nndev.org
keeper of the nn sources
http://www.nndev.org

> martha.crocker@sanantonio.gov wrote:
>> Morning,
>> I'm looking for justification for keeping my SunBlade desktop instead
>> of only having a Windows PC to do my administration work from.
>>
>> I currently have a Windows laptop that I use with a docking station at
>> work and carry with me for on-call activities. I also have a SunBlade
>> 1000 on my desk which I use for day-to-day activities and to run
>> overnight and long jobs that I can't run on the laptop because I take
>> it home at night.
>>
>> Unless I can come up with some good justifictions, my company is
>> wanting to take away my Solaris desktop and have me only use my
>> laptop. I'd rather just keep my Sun Blade and turn in my laptop.
>


http://www.msfree.com/

Some of it is useful

Paul

Michael T Pins wrote:

> The main justification, at least for me, is the drastically improved
> productivity. In my current job I was stuck with nothing but a Windoze
> laptop for the first month or so. It cost me at least an hour a day
> (likely more) in lost productivity by having to deal with Windoze dreadful
> UI. It doesn't take very long to pay for itself.
>

EXCELLENT POINT

Currently I'm using a rather old Sun Ultra 80 (4 x 450 MHz, 4 GB RAM)
which must be worth all of a couple of hundred pounds now here in the UK.

Also I have here a top end laptop (Sony VGN-SZ4XWN/C) which cost me over
1600 pounds ($3200) a few months back. It has 2 GB RAM, 120 GB disk, 2
Duo Core T7200 2 GHz CPU, Nvida GeForce 7400 graphics, Windows Vista
Ultimate etc etc. At the time I bought it, it was the second most
expensive laptop in the Sony Vaio range.

Basically the laptop is about as good as laptops go, but the old Sun is
definitely more productive! I've spent the day writing UNIX scripts and
C programs to process some experimental data. Doing this on a laptop via
SSH or similar would have been a pain in the butt to say the least.
Writing the code on Windows, without having a UNIX box at all would have
been very painful.


One other thing.

I often play chess online, using the Internet Chess Club. I must admit I
don't use a UNIX client (the Windows ones are generally better), but I
do often use the client software for the chess server (Blitzin) on my
SunPCi card in the Sun. Clearly this 733 MHz celeron processor SunPCi
card, which as 1 GB of RAM is not as fast as my dual core 2 GHz laptop.
But, it is a lot more plesent to use than the laptop.


It seems there can be quite a few god arguments for keeping the Blade.

--
Dave (from the UK)

Please note my email address changes periodically to avoid spam.
It is always of the form: month-year@althorne.org
Hitting reply will work for a few months only - later set it manually.

http://chessdb.sourceforge.net/ - a Free open-source Chess Database

On Aug 25, 4:18 am, "Dave (from the UK)" <see-my-signat...@see-
below.com> wrote:
> Michael T Pins wrote:
> > The main justification, at least for me, is the drastically improved
> > productivity. In my current job I was stuck with nothing but a Windoze
> > laptop for the first month or so. It cost me at least an hour a day
> > (likely more) in lost productivity by having to deal with Windoze dreadful
> > UI. It doesn't take very long to pay for itself.
<SNIP>
> Basically the laptop is about as good as laptops go, but the old Sun is
> definitely more productive! I've spent the day writing UNIX scripts and
> C programs to process some experimental data. Doing this on a laptop via
> SSH or similar would have been a pain in the butt to say the least.
> Writing the code on Windows, without having a UNIX box at all would have
> been very painful.
<SNIP>

My main machine her at work is an old old SunBlade 100 thats still
going. We have a mixed Citrix / Solaris enviroment and the main reason
we have this around is:

1) Can test SPARC patches on this machine without affecting anything
2) A lot easier working in with multiple terminal windows in Gnome
than Windows
3) We have a number of Gnome/X-Windows front end utilities that graph
system performance
4) A lot easier to manage the multiple Citrix sessions I have floating
around
5) It's always up which means I can get into this machine no matter
what.

Cheers,

Glenn

Dave (from the UK) wrote:

> EXCELLENT POINT
>
> Currently I'm using a rather old Sun Ultra 80 (4 x 450 MHz, 4 GB RAM)
> which must be worth all of a couple of hundred pounds now here in the UK.
>
> Also I have here a top end laptop (Sony VGN-SZ4XWN/C) which cost me over
> 1600 pounds ($3200) a few months back. It has 2 GB RAM, 120 GB disk, 2
> Duo Core T7200 2 GHz CPU, Nvida GeForce 7400 graphics, Windows Vista
> Ultimate etc etc. At the time I bought it, it was the second most
> expensive laptop in the Sony Vaio range.
>
> Basically the laptop is about as good as laptops go, but the old Sun is
> definitely more productive! I've spent the day writing UNIX scripts and
> C programs to process some experimental data. Doing this on a laptop via
> SSH or similar would have been a pain in the butt to say the least.
> Writing the code on Windows, without having a UNIX box at all would have
> been very painful.
>
>
> One other thing.
>
> I often play chess online, using the Internet Chess Club. I must admit I
> don't use a UNIX client (the Windows ones are generally better), but I
> do often use the client software for the chess server (Blitzin) on my
> SunPCi card in the Sun. Clearly this 733 MHz celeron processor SunPCi
> card, which as 1 GB of RAM is not as fast as my dual core 2 GHz laptop.
> But, it is a lot more plesent to use than the laptop.
>
>
> It seems there can be quite a few god arguments for keeping the Blade.
>

In the off-chance you want to use all or part of my mail to show to
someone else, I will give you my correct name and email, (Just in case
they think you faked the post).

Dr. David Kirkby Ph.D.

david (--dot--) kirkby (----at--) onetel.net

--
Dave (from the UK)

Please note my email address changes periodically to avoid spam.
It is always of the form: month-year@althorne.org
Hitting reply will work for a few months only - later set it manually.

http://chessdb.sourceforge.net/ - a Free open-source Chess Database