My Ultra

[joezilla]

I don't see a lot of Sun-love in this forum. Any other interesting machines here amongst the forum members?

My first experience with Sun where the old Sparcstations at our university computer lab (at UAH) in the early 90's. I implemented my first website on those back in the day when no-one knew what a website was and before Apache existed.

After that, I professionally implemented and launched many large scale web projects on entire Sun server farms (remember blades, 280's, and 480's?). Well, until the cloud appeared.

I have one left at home, an Ultra 5 which is architecturally slightly sad using IDE and other PC components alongside the Sparc CPU) The big downside being the embedded NVRAM battery, but I dremel'ed mine open and attached a battery to it - that should solve the problem forever.



SunOS FTW. I love Sun computers and am still sad they're not around anymore.

 

[g4ugm]

Sadly both my SUNS have died. I think they are hard to keep running, and once SUN locked down the licences they just became hard to fix...

 

[joezilla]

They are definitely not the easiest to keep running, but I’ve never had a license issue - at least not with Solaris 5.8 / 5.9.

 

[ajacocks]

Sun didn't lock down anything, FWIW. Oracle is the company that changed the licenses.

And, I would say that Sun hardware is actually very reliable. There are issues, of course, like any older hardware, but the most common is the failing of the battery in the IDPROM, causing the MAC address to be lost. That is a fairly easy fix, though.

- Alex

 

[MikeI]

Have 4 SUN's running ... a Blade 150, an IPC upgraded with the cycle board, an Ultra 25 and an Ultra 5. Think Solaris 8 on the IPC and Solaris 10 update 13 ( or update 10 ) on the others. Super reliable machines. I never bothered with trying to fix the NVRAM battery issues, I just turn them on, let them complain about the NVRAM contents and then enter "b disk" and they boot up .. have a shell script that runs an adb script that pokes a hostid into the right places and away we go. You can set that hostid to anything you want. Also have a dead IPC with a power supply issue and a cycle 5 board issue. SUN boxes were just so rock solid, remember when the whole y2k thing came out, I had already tested my Sun's and never lost a second of sleep over them, think I had one machine running continuously as a server for about 1 1/2 years, all the while getting updates and config changes and whatever without a reboot. Only real issue with any of these machines is getting a web browser to run on more than a handful of sites and having ssh run right ... it's been easier to just pull things down on my Mac and use a USB stick.