On Fri, 2010-11-05 at 14:30 -0400, Joe McDonagh wrote:
quoted text
> "If your Sun fails" <-- that's a big IF. It's approaching a possibility 
> of 0 in my experience.
> 
> If performance isn't an issue and stability is your chief goal, none of 
> this hardware is as stable as a Sun.

Not quite my experience.
In 2001 I worked at a place with a lot of used Sun hardware courtesy of
Fujitsu layoffs (Sparc 20s, Ultra 5s).
Entirely too many fried ethernet ports on the sparc 20s.
And it took too many iterations to find a sparc 20 that wouldn't crash
and burn while building OpenBSD from source.
A fidgety developer kicking an ultra 5 from a | orientation to a _
orientation would reliably destroy the power supply and harddrives.
On the bright side, I could repair the ultra 5s with power supply and
drives scavenged from eMachines with ALI motherboards with the wonderful
DMA that shoved garbage into memory for every OS we tried on them.

I thought the Micro Channel based RS/6Ks (Before the horrid SMP ones
designed by Group Bull) were a bit more bullet proof, with the only dead
hardware I'd experience being.
1) Rats pissing on the system boards, because the customer refused to
keep the covers on their systems in manufacturing.
2) A ladybird beetle invasion.
The RT PC was pretty reliable too.  I had one manufactured in 1987 that
was still trundling along in 2006 when I gave it away.