Win98 vs Win2K on AMD farm?

[DrSlinky]

Are there any drawbacks to sticking with win98 for my farm? The machines in question are an AthlonXP 2400+ and an Athlon 900, so dual processor support isn't required.

All these machines will do is fold and serve as a remote storage space. Getting a Win98 machine on the network and sharing the hard drive has not given me any problems.

 

[LiGhTBoY]

I would be more worried about the stability... win98 is not exactly very stable. Why not put linux on the farm and set up samba to mount it under windows?

 

[Papsomax]

Yes for 24/7/365 folding, WIn 98 get rid of.....Win2K, or XP(Pro) or of course Overclockix Live CD are the way to go for great 24/7/365 folding...

paps

 

[stan03]

Yes for 24/7/365 folding, WIn 98 get rid of.....Win2K, or XP(Pro) or of course Overclockix Live CD are the way to go for great 24/7/365 folding...

paps

wait what? in confused what exactly are you saing? win 98 get rid of 2k or XP? so lost

 

[Fast420A]

I had to reboot my Win98 farm every week or so as it would start to slow down. XP runs forever without any problems that I have seen.

 

[Scary_Penguin]

He's saying that DrSlinky should ditch 98 for farming and use 2k or XP. He then stated afterward that if you really wanted to go all out, you could build your diskless farm like he(Paps) did and use Arkaines Overclockix app.

 

[DrSlinky]

Why not put linux on the farm and set up samba to mount it under windows?

Sounds like this is going to be the best option. Getting more legal copies of XP isn't cheap, even with the personal use program. Microsoft's getting stingy(yes, i am implying that they used to give us crap dirt cheap).

Considering I have next to no experience in Linux, how much of a learning curve is this going to be?

 

[SavageBasher]

Yes, never put 98 on a farm. Unless you want to load mobo and lan drivers on every single install...

 

[hrdwrjnkie]

Overclockix does not have a huge learning curve, and the diskless install is all explained in the FAQ.

 

[DrSlinky]

Overclockix does not have a huge learning curve, and the diskless install is all explained in the FAQ.

I'm more worried about setting up Samba and getting it to talk to the XP machine. How much of a laerning curve is that?

 

[Karbon]

from what i hear, samba is very easy to setup, and there is a tutorial on how to do it in the FAQ at folding.octeams.com

I use 2000pro on all my folding pcs, IMO has best stability out of any windows OS

 

[walaka7]

hmm interesting. Ive used win 98SE on the farm rigs with weeks and months between boots (power glitch resets or updates only reason for reboot) Because of lower OS overhead i see a small increase in production over xp/xp pro and 2Kpro. The only problem i have with it (other than the fact i have an almost 100% dually farm now) is it will drop a gromac and start over in the event of a shutdown which can be a big deal if you have power resets. I do, however, recommend that if you do run 98, use a minimum of 128 meg of ram or you will see some strange stuff happen after a week of uptime

 

[Posidon42]

this is all very strange. 5 of my folding rigs are running win98 quite happily and have been doing so for over two months now. I have NEVER rebooted any of them and they have all been 100% stable for me. Of course, I used the minimal install, so almost nothing is there short of the required parts. I tried using the overclockix stuff, but I couldn't get it to work on my network. I am too lazy to work on it and it seems to be doing fine so far. Knock on wood...

 

[Gasoline]

Samba is fairly easy to set up and there are a ton of how-to's out there on the web, just google for them... there is also a really cool tool called "Webmin" that'll let you admin your Linux box thru a point-n-click GUI web browser interface from any other machine on the network with a web browser too. Also, there is a graphical web browser based admin tool called "swat" that comes with Samba.

For file sharing, you'll find that Samba is nearly twice as fast as an smb network file server than every version of Windows up to, but not including Windows Server 2003. W2K3 is only slightly slower than Linux/Samba on the same piece of hardware. We ran a big test at work with our new GIS data file server, with NT4, W2K , W2K3, and SuSE Linux 9.0/Samba. The Linux O/S was noticeably faster than any of the Windows OS's when opening up huge multi-layered ESRI GIS files from a Windows ESRI client, so we just left the server (An HP Proliant ML370 with dual 2.8GHz XEONs) running the SuSE Linux.