Grex Oldcoop Conference

Item 369: Do you want to sell the old Sun 4/670?

Entered by lar on Wed Oct 11 21:11:32 2006:

I'll give you a hundred bucks.
14 responses total.
#1 of 14 by aruba on Thu Oct 12 04:32:58 2006:

Grex owned several old Suns, and lots of spare parts, before moving out of
the Pumpkin last year.  We gave them all away during the move.  So Grex has
no Sun equipment to sell.  Sorry!

#2 of 14 by tod on Thu Oct 12 07:43:53 2006:

re #0
Dude, just get a copy of Solaris 8 for 386

#3 of 14 by lar on Thu Oct 12 13:06:05 2006:

Re#2
 I am all too familar with the x386 platform. I am a computer tech(If 
you call someone who fixes windows machines a "tech")
  I want to delve into some new territory and I am fascinated with the 
old sun machines.( due in part to the pumpkin tour and janc's comments 
in coop) It wouldn't be the same running Sol 8 on an intel box.
Redhat linux works better on intel.

#4 of 14 by tod on Thu Oct 12 20:45:28 2006:

re #3
I'd recommend you try a Sparc 10 or Netra pizzabox instead.  Those klunky Sun
3 & 4 servers suck alot of electricity, require odd SCSI board tinkering,
jewel case CD-ROM boot discs, and whacked out RGB monitors which an all go
bad in a heartbeat.  Trust me, you'll get more milage and more satisfaction
with something you can fit under a monitor on your desk than something that
you have to use as an end table and probably prop your windows open in Winter.

#5 of 14 by keesan on Thu Oct 12 23:00:53 2006:

We recycled the monitor for it already.

#6 of 14 by twenex on Fri Oct 13 15:37:36 2006:

A useful purchase for any Sun wannabe is probably a VGA-to-Sun monitor
adaptor.

#7 of 14 by tod on Fri Oct 13 21:00:57 2006:

Don't forget resolution and frequency constraints of the video card on your
Sun server when you decide to use an RGB-to-SVGA convertor.  And in the case
you get yourself a pizzabox Ultra5/10 then you'll need a male 13W3 to Male
HD15 convertor.

#8 of 14 by janc on Sun Oct 29 12:24:02 2006:

Well, I always did love the Sun 4/670.  You don't see computers like
that anymore.  You have to remember that the thing sold for something
like $100,000 when it first came to market.  When you build something in
that price range, you don't fool around.  The performance of the machine
may not compare to modern machines, but the general sense of solid
quality in every screw and bracket and circuit board was also something
not seen today.  They don't make computers like that any more, and never
again will.

I was both happy and sad to see it go.  You've seen the long detailed
pages I wrote up about the old Grex system.  That was fun to do.  Grex's
hardware was actually unique and interesting.  I always meant to do a
new version for the new system, but it would be comparatively dull.  Now
Grex is just another computer, not appreciably different from millions
of others.  We had to move into the 21st century, but it's kind of sad
too.

#9 of 14 by maus on Tue Nov 14 18:35:53 2006:

Sun's machines used to be rock solid, built to last. Sadly, ever since
the Sun Blade series of workstations, they have been less so. I have
started moving off of sun-build machines onto industrial equivalents. I
have three boxes that I run in place of SunFire V100s, because I
consider them to be more reliable, more manageable. These boxes are in
cPCI chasses from Marathon, and were designed to be high performance
firewalls and were designed to provide five nines in an unclustered
configuration for Exodus Communications (now Savvis). Spec as follows: 

- 3 slot (single system slot, two satelite slots) cPCI chassis
- Redundant, hot-pluggable AC power supplies
- Redundant, hot-pluggable 9 GByte SCSI drives
- Hot-pluggable, high-capacity blower can (removable fan unit)
- Netra CP1500-440 System board (has an Ultrasparc 2e proc, serial
console, HME, 7-segment display for status). This would be hot-pluggable
if the system had either dual-master system boards or a satelite system
board.
- 2 PMC (PCI Mezzanine Card) RAM boards (one has 2x512, the other two
have 2x256). These stack on top of the system board.
- Hot-pluggable ZNYX 4-port Fast Ethernet NIC
- Hot-pluggable LSI U160 SCSI board

This beast is built to run forever. Sadly, the operating environment I
use on it cannot deal with hot-plugging at this time. I hope OBSD will
be able to deal with hot-pluggable hardware (and its sudden absence and
reappearance) sometime soon (like, before 5.0).

#10 of 14 by ric on Wed Nov 15 18:19:16 2006:

re 3 - referring to a Sun 4 as "new territory" is kind of amusing.

#11 of 14 by twenex on Wed Nov 15 18:19:50 2006:

Hahah!

#12 of 14 by mdw on Thu Nov 16 03:44:19 2006:

Grex's sun-670 had a serial console.  If it had video hardware, we successfully
ignored it.  Unless you really need a very slow and not very modern X server,
you probably won't care about this.  If you're just looking for something fun
to hack with, the sun ultra-5 is probably a better choice.  It's 64 bits,
there's more choice of what you run on it, it's *much* quieter, and
the hardware expansion is almost modern.  Ie, you can plug regular ATA drives
in etc.

#13 of 14 by denise on Thu Nov 16 08:42:07 2006:

Marcus!!

#14 of 14 by ball on Tue Feb 27 04:15:21 2007:

Occasionally I still find myself thinking about a 4/640. :-)

There are no more items selected.

You have several choices: