[SunHELP] To Sell or Not To Sell

[Sheldon T. Hall]

 thad at acedsl.com writes ...

> I having a dilemma that maybe someone could help me with. I
> have a SparcStation
> 20 that I've put a fair amount of money and work into over
> the last 6 years.

man "sunk cost"

> I want to get rid of it for two reasons: (1) I'm basically a
> WinDoze drone right now in my career ...

Yeah, but having non-Windows skills will be handy when your employer wakes
up.  Or if he doesn't, and so you need a new one.

> ... and (2) I'm running out of space to keep it.

An SS20 ought to fit almost anywhere ... under the bed, in the back of a
closet, etc.  You can't _run_ it in all those locations, but you could store
it there.

> But I'm having a hard time departing with my machine. It has
> been a workhorse
> for me over the years. I added 4 processors to it, as well as
> two 9GB SCSI
> drives. It not as powerful as some of the other machines on
> the market today,

Maybe, but it's probably still faster than the network it's on.

> I guess my question is, should I just sell it, or should I
> keep it around to
> put it to use again (It's been idle for at least a year and a half)?

Fire it up and make it a server/firewall/whatever on your home LAN.  Run it
headless and use a Windows box for access (telnet, X, whatever).  I run a
much older and slower machine as a DNS server (with ad banner blocking, so
it's a "master" for about 2,000 zones), SMTP, POP3, NTP, DHCP/BOOTP/TFTP,
etc., and it does Just Fine.  Oh, and it also handles multi-stage backups
(to disk, then to tape) for a number of Windows machines.

I'm migrating those services to a bigger machine, but only because it's a
learning experience and the bigger machine has more disk space.  The
SPARCclassic did very nicely for many years.

-Shel