Obscure platform testbed

[Kevin Day]

On Feb 13, 2013, at 3:53 PM, Joshua Isom <jrisom at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 2/12/2013 10:20 AM, Kevin Day wrote:
>> 
>> I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, so if you know of anyone who may be interested in this please forward to them. Right now my company (your.org) does the free amd64/i386 VMs for FreeBSD developers.
>> 
>> For an unrelated project, we're trying to build a testbed of many of the more obscure *nix boxes, both running their native OS and a modern OS. As an example, we've now got two SGI O2 R10K boxes, one running IRIX and one running NetBSD. We're planning on doing the same for Sparc64(Solaris and FreeBSD), VAX, ARM, etc. Where possible we'll have NFS mounted home directories and NIS to have shared logins across the "cluster".
> 
> I imagine your request would be more geared towards porters than hackers.  What you're creating would be of more use to someone developing portable software.  I wouldn't personally use it, but people trying to develop for *nix but not just linux would need something.
> 
> As for non-intel boxes, you're probably better off with emulators that support networking.  Older processors are horribly power efficient by todays standards, and a lot of the interesting systems have emulators available.

For this project, we really do need the real hardware. Long story, but we need to demonstrate certain operations on legacy hardware itself. So, while we're going through this hassle I thought I'd make it public if there are any takers.

I've had a few people interested in using it, and a couple people offering up hardware. If anyone has interest, please contact me for more off-list info! :)

-- Kevin