sun servers

elecplus · 11 Dec 2015, 18:43

Who in the Dallas area wants 2 6-foot tall Sun/SGI servers? Not known if working, assume they will need a lot of TLC.

XMIT · 11 Dec 2015, 18:47

Old servers are a hard sell. A modern workstation has more CPU power than a rack of late 90s MIPS or Sparc servers.

But who knows, maybe someone will want it.

andrewjoy · 11 Dec 2015, 18:59

IF its an E10k i am sure someone somewhere will take em

DanielT · 15 Dec 2015, 08:44

andrewjoy wrote: IF its an E10k i am sure someone somewhere will take em

The problem with older SUN servers is that Solaris 11 is not supported anymore. And the power consumption on those is just crazy. And just to run Solaris 10 on them doesn't bring much, you're missing all the cool stuff.

andrewjoy · 15 Dec 2015, 10:44

If i had the space and the money i would have an E10K if it only ran on CP/M. They so so fecking cool, and totaly nuts , the interconnect is like an 11 layer board with on board power regulation and cost 500,000 dollars to replace when it was a current product!

snuci · 15 Dec 2015, 13:05

I'm sure someone will take them. Have you tried posting on http://vintage-computer.com forums or the CC Talk list? I'm sure someone will take them from there.

I have two types of Suns. A Sparc Classic (my first Sun exposure) and two Sun Voyagers. If the Voyager keyboard wasn't a rubber dome keyboard, I would have posted pics of it. It's the not-easy-to-find tenkeyless Compact-1 keyboard and is actually pretty decent to type on.

andrewjoy · 15 Dec 2015, 13:40

Nothing wrong with posting a rubber done if its decent.

XMIT · 17 Dec 2015, 13:20

I did manage to get a few (awful) photos of the Sun system when I was in Dallas on Monday. A bunch of photos below.

The Dallas facility is a real working warehouse with forklifts and pallets and not very much space! I did the best I could given available time and equipment.

Spoiler:

andrewjoy · 17 Dec 2015, 13:29

An SGI in a sun rack ! Ooo thats , controversial!

Looks like its specs are ( maximum)

12× UltraSPARC III 192GB Ram

No internal disk controller , so fibre channel or similar required

Most likely will need an SSP to boot it and bring it up ( usually a sun desktop), this will have licence keys etc on it.

High availability options, should be able to segregate it into multiple machines running across all the board, hotswap blades ect ect , top of the line in its day.

Not quite as cool as a E10K but its pretty cool.

You will need 240v 60amp to even boot this thing.

XMIT · 17 Dec 2015, 13:31

Well, that thing is an "SGI graphics compositor" which I assume means that it pulls video input from a bunch of sources, performs some texturing operations, and offers one or more outputs. It could be a KVM, a security system, part of a rendering farm, who knows!

The best indication of model I saw was "Sun Fire 4900". Note that this was all across two racks, not one.

Argh, I only have 240V 30A in my garage for charging the car! Not quite enough power.

andrewjoy · 17 Dec 2015, 13:47

Depending on how stacked out it is you could possibly get it up on that.

I hope the 240 you have uses a proper plug and not them daft US things that are unsafe!

XMIT · 17 Dec 2015, 14:03

I have two phase 240V out in the garage. The electrician I consulted quoted adding a third phase at a paltry 30000 USD.

My 240v is terminated with a NEMA 14-50 "RV plug", which looks like this:

: Cooper_Wiring_Devices_Nema_14-50_5754N.jpg (6.65 KiB) Viewed 2582 times

andrewjoy · 17 Dec 2015, 14:19

we have some 415v 3 phase in the building at work, scary do not touch stuff.

DanielT · 17 Dec 2015, 18:29

Nice machine, back then it was a really cool thing. I remember when I installed the first ones it took ages to boot and to check all boards and subsystems. It was so cool to be able to configure domains and stuff like that. Now you have a M10 which is 10% the size of E10k and has a LOT more power. But the purple SUN times were the best

I have a rack magnet install guide, it used to come with each rack, I'm using it as a cool fridge magnet, I have to take a shot of it because it is mega cool

@snuci: those compact keyboards are very nice, I would love to get my hands on one and on a java station, but shipping from US, where these are still in the wild is a killer. The keyboard is a nice rubberdome, I use to type a lot on SUN keyboards long time ago. I have at home an Ultra10 and Ultra5 workstation, big SUN fan here, not so big fan of the "red" direction the things are going right now. But I have the best work related memories with SUN equipment, and the worst too

Thos purple monsters kick like a mule

DanielT · 17 Dec 2015, 18:33

Related to the power consumption we had a second rack full with FC disk arrays connected to a E10k, you had to be careful when powering up that beast, a coleague once started all the arrays at once and caused an overload, 10 racks lost power at that moment

lucky him it was 2AM or else....

andrewjoy · 17 Dec 2015, 18:45

Should the AC sequencers (The 2 silver things with very expensive looking connectors and a few DB-9s.)not take care of that ? The E10k had 2 of them as standard , one for each router. So when you bring the system up from the SSP it should be set up to sequence the disk arrays and any other accessories .

XMIT · 17 Dec 2015, 18:46

Do you mean this?

That's very pretty - a tenkeyless Sun Type 5 or similar. Maybe I'll make one!

DanielT · 17 Dec 2015, 19:03

Yep that one

What I also love are SUN mouse pads, the one in the photo is missing in my collection. A few weeks ago I managed to snach another one that I was missing, mint condition

DanielT · 17 Dec 2015, 19:08

andrewjoy wrote: Should the AC sequencers (The 2 silver things with very expensive looking connectors and a few DB-9s.)not take care of that ? The E10k had 2 of them as standard , one for each router. So when you bring the system up from the SSP it should be set up to sequence the disk arrays and any other accessories .

In a perfect world yes, but we were cheap so the second rack was added later and lacked the control. Those were just JBOD's and we had Veritas for volume management and FS. Long story, we learned to do high end stuff the cheap way

most of the configurations were "not supported"

And this is the "fridge magnet", 6 magnets on the back, can't get more geeky than that

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