[rescue] new to the list: new E250 owner, just saying hello.

[Bryan Gurney]

On Thu, 12 Jan 2006 15:18:17 -0500, dsimmons <dsimmons at libx.siu.edu> wrote:

> SYN
>
> I have been reading this list with great interest. I look forward to
> learning some interesting things here that I might not come across
> elsewhere.
>
> I am anxiously awaiting my first personal piece of class B equipment: I
> have an E250 coming via an ebay auction. I got Dual USII/300's, a gig of
> ram and 6 9's for $0.99+$135 shipping. :-) I bought the N+1 p.s. in
> another auction, just because it was there. I also got a front bezel for
> it because not having it would have bugged the crap out of me. It's my
> toy, I guess I can purchase non-essential components for it if I want
> to. :-)
>

ACK

Good to hear; my favorite of My Three Suns (geddit?!) is my Ultra 2 with  
two USII/300's, 640MB of RAM, an 18 GB Cheetah and a 24-bit Creator3D  
card.  Judging from the 24-bit framebuffer and the single hard drive, its  
best role would be as a workstation.  This machine runs Solaris 10; you  
can use the Free RTU license on machines with 1 to 4 CPUs (with Solaris 9  
it was single processor only).

I've used another Ultra 2 before that was running software RAID through  
the Solstice DiskSuite (or whatever it's called now); the performance was  
rather good for a 9-year-old machine.  I don't know about raid1d on Linux  
on an UltraSparc box; most of the ones I've worked with were running  
Solaris of some version.  I'd certainly like to get some more drives, but  
I'd probably go with new ones (haven't had an MIT swapfest drive fail on  
me, but I have a 9GB Cheetah that runs pretty hot, and I had another one  
before that ran noisy).  I know that an Ultra 2 can take 74 GB drives, but  
can my wallet? ;-)

The Sun systems handbook for the E250  
( http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/E250/spec.html ) says it  
has 2 channels of SCSI, and it's Ultra-SCSI, unlike my U2's 20MB/s  
fast-wide SCSI.  I remember wanting an E450 as an end table, but they  
still command a bit of a price on eBay, and I don't have the physical  
space right now.

> As I said, this machine will start out as a toy. I
> may put it to actual work at some point, but for a little while, I'll
> probably just sit and listen to the hum of all those fans and repeat my
> new mantra: "MY Sun box. MY Sun box. MY Sun box." :-)

Ditto here.  My other two Suns are:

-a 440 MHz Ultra 5 with 1 GB of RAM; my dream is to have it running a  
Quake 2 server or something (Id Software has dedicated server binaries for  
Solaris 8, and I remember running the client in Solaris 9 on the U2, so I  
know it works).

-a SparcStation 5 110 MHz with 256 GB of RAM; I just finished installing  
NetBSD 3.0 on this machine.  It's definitely not a processing power champ,  
but it'll go to some use soon.  Maybe a MySQL server so I can train a bit  
on DB stuff, but a DHCP/DNS server would be even more practical.