[rescue] misc old Sun resources

[Sheldon T. Hall]

Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> said on Sun, 21 Jul 2002 14:24:39 -0400
...

> You really got an LX out of a dumpster five years ago?  That was quite
> a score.  I was still selling them for Real Money(tm) then.

Well, that's a shorthand version of the story ...

Actually, I didn't pick the LX out of the trash; a friend picked an IPX, an
LX, and some Hyundai Sun clone out of a dumpster behind Apple in Cupertino
in 1996.  Being a Mac sort of guy, he gave me the IPX; he had visions of
making the LX into some sort of graphics rendering box, so he kept it.

The IPX had memory, a small drive, and SunOS 4.<something> on it.  Once I
figured out the serial cable, it even booted, though it whinged incessantly
about various things like missing NFS files and being on the wrong network.
I fooled with it for a while, eventually putting a full compliment of memory
in it, a 2-gig HD, installing Solaris 2.5.1 (and later [2.]7), etc.  It ran
fine until I tried to install a Sun patch cluster on it in 1999; that
trashed the disk.

So he gave me the LX, which he had already put on the curb when I called him
about the IPX's demise.  He'd found out that the LX wasn't going to make him
the next Lucasfilms, so he'd tossed it.  I fixed it up and used it as a
server until earlier this year, when its HD went bad.  I then built-out one
of my $5 OSU Surplus Classics to use as a server, and made the LX a
workstation....

But it _is_ a Dumpster Darling, even if the story is a little longer than
first related.

-Shel
--
Sheldon T. Hall
shel at cmhc.com
206-780-7971 (Office)
206-842-2858 (Home)