Solaris

Hi! I am currently an M$ engineer who wants to move my career towards UNIX. My datacenter has about 300 Sun servers but not enough SA's (we also have 1800 Windows Servers). My manager is supportive of my moving toward UNIX, and I know it won't be an overnight move, but I am willing to put in the reading and practice time become an SA.

I would like to get a Sun system for home experimentation, to try out things that I am reading about before I blow up a production V880 or 4800. I was looking on ebay and Ultra 5's and 10's looks like something I can get for <$100 (about all I can afford right now), and having just moved and gotten rid of most of my old accumulated Intel equipment I can't really cobble together an x86 system. I would appreciate any opinions of what I can buy for my home that I can install Solaris on that would help in my move to becoming a Solaris SA? Thanks!

Bob

for practice, the el-cheapo Ultra-10s from ebay should suffice ... download Solaris 9 or 10 from Sun --- make your bootable install CDs with Nero --- and install if not already there ...

get some sun books too ... and look at sun's bigadmin page (http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/) ... you can also google for sun resources ...