Solaris

I just got moved to a new office building, and as I was unpacking my stuff I saw an odd tower PC in the nearby recycling heap. It turned out to be a Sun Ultra 10 Elite3D workstation, complete with keyboard, mouse, and monster-sized CRT with the wacky Sun video cable.

I just set everything up and powered it on, and the POST screen shows it having a 440MHz CPU and 768 megs of RAM - pretty beefy by ~2002 standards! It appears to boot to a "Sun OpenWindows" logon screen for the original user. I have no interest in the previous owners files or stuff - I'd much rather just reset the OS to factory (if possible) and play around with it, as if I'd just bought it new and were setting it up for the first time.

I've been digging around online, but it doesn't look like Solaris 8 or 9 (what I understand to be the preferred OS's for the Ultra 10) are available to download anymore. Can anyone give me some guidance on what my next steps should be? There are no CD's around that appear to go with this thing, so if I need reinstallation media I guess I'll either be trying to download it (not sure that's possible anymore) or buy it on eBay or something.

TL;DR: Found a Sun Ultra 10 Elite3D workstation, would like to reset it to factory default software. What do I need to do?

You could just reinstall the OS on it. You can download Solaris 10 from Oracle. They give it away for free. Your machine is old so you will have to check the hardware requirements to see if Solaris 10 will run on it.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've created an Oracle account and I see that I can download the DVD image for Solaris 10 - however, this box only has a CD-ROM drive. Am I correct in assuming that Solaris 10 isn't available in CD ISO format? Can I just swap in a plain IDE DVD drive in place of the old CD drive?

Thanks for the suggestions - this box is pretty neat, and it would be fun to have it up and running again!

setup a boot server in a virtual environment and install solaris over the network. and yes, you can install solaris for sparc from a x86 solaris boot server.

after booting over network you have two options:

- reset the root password for the machine and run "sysunconfig" to make a reset of the installation (network, name, ...)
- install solris 10 and start from scratch

you can find the documentation for solaris (and on how to install it) on docs.oracle.com

hth,
dn2

I wouldn't recommend installing Solaris 10 on a 440MHz/768 MB server. That would be at best a disappointing and painful experience.

You'd rather instead find a SPARC bootable CD, any release, run a shell from it then mount the internal disk and clear root and other user's password.

The textinstall-134-sparc.iso image available here or martux here should work.