Solaris

Hi all,

My home server was Solaris for quite a while- I started with an Ultra 2 about 20 years ago, ended with a Blade 2000- but I've transitioned to Linux and am not going back. I miss the Solaris experience a bit (but not the Oracle experience), besides running with modern and small and quiet hardware is a nice change. Consequently, I'd like to get rid of the Sun equipment. Most of it is a result of scrounging ebay and ecyclers. All of it works, all of it is free.

2 Sun Blade 2000's, one with 2x750mhz cpu's, one with 2x1.2ghz cpu's. I am a little suspicious of the stability of the 1.2ghz processors but it could be memory or the motherboard. about 8 gigs of assorted ram as well, the machines both have 1gig+ in each, IIRC one of them has 4 gigs. I have a sun gigabit ethernet card and a couple pci-x quad 1 gig Intel ethernet boards in spares box. Vid boards are the usual Creator 3D, there is one spare. There are a couple misc pci boards as well; usb board, video and a couple conventional ethernets. I've run Solaris 9,10, Opensolaris and Linux on these machines- they make really good servers even using USB media, but they take a lot of power. These were a great upgrade path from the Ultra 60's I ran with for a while.

Ultra 2 with 2x450mhz processors, 2 gigs ram installed (might be 1 or 1.5- been a while since I've used this machine). This is more or less the highest spec Ultra 2 cpu-wise. There are a few sbus cards to go with; quad 100baseT, scsi, 8 port serial (the serial board comes with the matching breakout box and cable). Solaris 8,9.10 and Linux run well on this machine. I got this one to experiment with the sbus frame grabber board, which is installed- it works but the 8 bit color is kind of primitive nowadays lol.

Ross Hyperstation 30- basically a sparcstation 20 with quad 120mhz processors. 384megs onboard, and a 9gig hard disk, 100baset sbus board (onboard 10baset)- there are a couple xbus vid boards as well. I got this as a curiosity.. solaris 9 runs fine on it, Linux might that would be an interesting experiment- 32 bit only.

I also have a couple Sunvideo to VGA dongles, a few scsi cables and spare FC disks (for the Blades), some for the Ultra 2, Solaris 8 and 9 cd/dvd media, 1 6c usb keyboard and a couple Sun mice, and a 5c keyboard and crossbow style Sun mouse for the Ultra/Ross machines.

This is basically my "live" and "spare parts" inventory, I ran the main server using zfs on scsi but this old Sun hardware is kind of an expensive way to do things nowadays. I have a very similar setup now, Linux w/ zfs- faster modern hardware, twice the capacity at a fraction of the cost, probably 1/10th the power consumption. I was hoping to find someone who might like this stuff to work with, rather than dumping it in the recycling bin. I've always liked old Sun hardware and Solaris but the world has moved on since then.

I live in southwest Baltimore, items can be picked up at my house; I can leave items on the porch or meet someplace reasonably convenient to hand off. Obviously I'd rather get rid of it all in one shot but whatevs...

Thanks,

Greg

---------- Post updated at 04:02 PM ---------- Previous update was at 10:26 AM ----------

Ugh- tested the Ultra 2- it powers but no keyboard bios lights, Stop-N no good. I reseated the cpu's and ram, no change.

The Ross runs fine but the battery backed cmos is long dead, but a Stop-N boot gets into openprom and the disk boots fine.

Both Blade2k's are good, 2 gigs ram each. Just finishing wiping the old server drives on one, my spare has a fresh opensolaris install w/ zfs root. Both systems have quad 1gig ethernet pci-x cards. I generally run servers with vlan over lag, those quad cards were quite nice for that kind of thing.