Oh my God, yes they do.
We had a 64-processor engine like that in the lab when I worked at Xerox, and when we were experimenting with a PC-based Slackware Linux server that was only going to do a tiny little admin solution of bridging a Xerox DC2000 DocuCentre color laser printer to our dishwasher-sized Sun UltraSPARC, the Linux box choked and wheezed and gave up requiring a hard reboot at the power switch.
Just like the mythical knights of England who tried to pull Excalibur from the stone, every engineer on staff tried their hand at optimizing the Linux box (which was a pretty pimped-out PC for the time) but they all eventually gave up.
Eventually, we went back to the *original* bridge solution, which was an MS-DOS 6.22 PC on the exact same hardware. All the Linux box had to do was stream an unending river of code from one machine to the other, but only DOS did it without having a heart attack. DOS wasn't even using the maximum 32Mb of extended memory that emm386.exe could address!
Our lab's Linux advocate sulked for awhile after that, especially after a project manager referred to the Linux box a 'Nintendo Gameboy' in a weekly staff meeting.
The only reason we even tried the switch was because we were trying to satisfy one customer's demand that 'We don't trust DOS. It's too old. We want Linux.'
I think that Xerox uses a WinNT4 solution to do that job now, but I doubt even that was necessary.
Thanks...:)
He could always use that Linux server for a Tivo.
Use what works.
When it comes to server-based configurations, UNIX, AIX, or any version of Linux will run circles around NT. I don't care if it's clustering, web serving, or web clustering.
And, oh, it's so much less expensive.
The only Windows server we run is for our email (Exchange). My supervisor just has this thing for Exchange.
