[rescue] another sandia/los Alamos auction

[Skeezics Boondoggle]

On Thu, 12 Feb 2004, Stephen Sukovich wrote:

[Bill Bradford wrote]:
> > The first U1/200E I got from them, back in '99, looked BRAND NEW.  It
> > was my desktop box for 2+ years.

For those in the PNW (especially), I highly recommend Solar Systems -
they've been excellent.  A few years back they stocked just about every
imaginable Sun part in the universe, but finally had to cast off most of
their older sun4/sun4c/sun4d/sun4m stuff; they focus on Ultras now.

And the U1/200E that was my desktop box for 2 years was from Solar, only
to be upgraded later to a U2/2300.  Everything they ship is in top shape,
properly burned in and tested, beautifully and professionally packaged,
and shipped fast.

I'm not affiliated in any way, just a satisfied customer.  There's so much
great used Sun gear out there, I'm glad there are so many reputable
resellers to choose from. :-)

> Oh don't worry once I can afford it ill get stuff from anysystem. My
> dream is a e10000 for $20k and free shipping. Then ill have to find a
> use for it.

Well, over the last few months I've tracked a number of E10Ks on Ebay;  
12-way/12GB for $14.5K, 20-way/10GB or 20-way/20GB machines for $19-22K...  
Crazy.  Totally crazy.  They only fell off the price list last year, and 
were still fetching $1M+!

If anyone on Rescue _does_ pick up an E10K, I would highly recommend
calling SunMOVES.  They're the folks at Sun who schedule the shipping and
installation of the big high-end systems like the StarFire and newer
SunFires.  Prices range from around $1.5K to $5K depending on how premium
a level of service you want - they'll actually roll the thing into your
datacenter and completely set it up for you if you want.  But the basic
service (pad wrapped, air-ride van w/NorthAmerican Van Lines) is much more
affordable, and I've had very good luck with them.

So unless you're able to do your own pickup and know how to properly
secure a large, heavy, rolling load like that, I think it's definitely
worth it to pay for someone experienced in moving big machines so that
your stuff arrives intact.  It'd be a Really Sad Day if your E10K fell
over and got crunched because some LTL freight company didn't know how to
properly secure it. :-/

And on Rescue, you'd probably be lynched if you rolled your 1983 B210 and
destroyed an E10K because you thought you could secure it with a couple of
bungee cords and some nylon rope. :-)


> Now I got a strange question... was IS everyone using their sun machines
> for?

Everything!  Well, just about everything.  Damn, I wish Apple would do a
Quicktime for Solaris.  Anyone remember NeXTTIME?  That ran on 33Mhz
68040s - I'm sure that any decently configured sun4m could keep up... so
Apple has already ported Quicktime to Mach/BSD (NeXTstep and MacOSX), and
they even have their own X11 port now, and before that Sun & Apple had
collaborated on OpenStep, which ran on Solaris and X11.  So really, all
the bits and pieces were there - how hard could it be to produce a Solaris
Quicktime port?  Y'know, for free download for the few hundred (?) of us
hobbyist nuts who still run Suns at home? :-)

Yeah, I won't be holding my breath on that one.

Cheers,

-- Chris