So, I have a Blade 150... dual 80GB drives and 1.5GB RAM running OpenBSD 7.6 but as you would appreciate it is slow, compiling rust programs that use many libraries ("crates") is very very slow (and often aborts due to various issues that I have yet to troubleshoot) so decided to upgrade to a "newer" (well it is actually chronologically older by 2 years) Sun Blade 1000. The 150 has been great as a low power, low noise BSD box but is very limiting in use when compiling stuff due to a single 650MHZ USIIi.
The B1000 is coming in a few days.. spec unknown but is a Dual CPU and likely has 2GB minimum, as well as 2 x 10K FCAL drives and what he says is a basic ATI card (XVR-300?). It is *FULL* of dust (and I even saw a spider crawling up the outside of one of the CPU's in images!!!) and looks like it hasn't been used for at least a decade.... he did say untested from a company clearance but the power light eventually goes steady green when he powered it up (to me indicates it gets to the OBP stage past diagnostics so could well be OK).
First step a THOROUGH clean!
From what I can gather the best way to max out this machine is:
1. Upgrade OBP firmware (if Mobo revision allows)
2. Two faster CPU's, the 1.2GHZ "Cu" versions would then be possible if firmware permits
3. 8GB RAM (is 16GB possible?)
4. LSI SAS3080X-R PCI-X card will allow large fast SSD's (it does on the 1500/2500 so perhaps the 1000/2000 as well?)
5. XVR-1000 card (*but* they are far more expensive than the machine itself... this may need to wait).
I am going to use as my daily driver (is OK in some respects as I use latest OpenBSD, xfce and VIM which are lightweight) - I expect the browsers to struggle though but I will see if I can sort that issue out.
Any other tips or advice to turbo-charge this "beast" (it is a beast of a machine for sure!).
The B1000 is coming in a few days.. spec unknown but is a Dual CPU and likely has 2GB minimum, as well as 2 x 10K FCAL drives and what he says is a basic ATI card (XVR-300?). It is *FULL* of dust (and I even saw a spider crawling up the outside of one of the CPU's in images!!!) and looks like it hasn't been used for at least a decade.... he did say untested from a company clearance but the power light eventually goes steady green when he powered it up (to me indicates it gets to the OBP stage past diagnostics so could well be OK).
First step a THOROUGH clean!
From what I can gather the best way to max out this machine is:
1. Upgrade OBP firmware (if Mobo revision allows)
2. Two faster CPU's, the 1.2GHZ "Cu" versions would then be possible if firmware permits
3. 8GB RAM (is 16GB possible?)
4. LSI SAS3080X-R PCI-X card will allow large fast SSD's (it does on the 1500/2500 so perhaps the 1000/2000 as well?)
5. XVR-1000 card (*but* they are far more expensive than the machine itself... this may need to wait).
I am going to use as my daily driver (is OK in some respects as I use latest OpenBSD, xfce and VIM which are lightweight) - I expect the browsers to struggle though but I will see if I can sort that issue out.
Any other tips or advice to turbo-charge this "beast" (it is a beast of a machine for sure!).
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