[rescue] Sun V120 update

[Earl Baugh]

Thanks for all the comments... and to be clear, I wasn't offended by any of
the RTFL archives responses.
I should have elaborated more on where I'm coming from and what I was
looking for.  And you're right,
probably dug into the archives more..

(I also should have spent a bit more time editing my e-mail...it was
somewhat stream of consciousness
while I was busy at work..not a recipe for the best e-mail)

I had read the thread, btw, and hadn't actually seen firm
answers/conclusions... at least in how I understood them.

A few comments


RE: Oracle vs Solaris 8

Well on this page :
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris/overview/releases-jsp-140987.html
It seems that Oracle considers Solaris 8 one of their products.  This is
one of the things that had confused me.
The box set of OS's I have (thru Solaris 9) only have Sun logos, no Oracle.
However, I've seen Solaris boxes
(not sure which version) which have Oracle stuff injected.    Given the
long experience I have with Oracle products
(since version 3 of the RDBMs, loaded off 9 track tape....yes you could get
it on that...) and at times having access
to source, I'm a bit leery of anything but DB products of theirs.   I've
used Sun's since the 3/110 (and own working early
Suns... a Sun 1/100, Sun 2/120 (being re-assembled), Sun 3/110, Sun
4/110...) so am quite familiar with Sun OS and
extensively used Solaris thru Solaris 2.5.1 (touched on 7, but not much) I
wasn't quite sure exactly what Oracle had done
with the OS when they acquired Sun.  My Sun use has been light for the last
few years, work wise, and had some HW
issues on the Suns I had in the 8 ft rack in my office. It is time for me
to get that fixed (though to be honest, I've been busier
with the older Suns during this time).  BTW, End of support for Solaris 8
was 2 years after Oracle acquired Sun as well...


RE: V120

Yes, I was considering installing a frame buffer.  It wasn't just the
logo/copyright, it was whether or not they'd been
 tweaking things... changing the motd wasn't the main concern.


>I admin hundreds of Solaris 11.3+ boxes at $WORK everyday, and I promise
you
>that Solaris is still the rock hard solid Unix operating system it has
always been.

The above is really what I was looking for find out, but didn't ask very
well...


RE: ISOs

Yes, Peter made a general mention of ISOs, but given I hadn't asked
specifically before, I didn't know
who had what (and what is available on-line).   I dug thru my computer
collection and found a Solaris 8 boxed
set, just not sure what patches and what release exactly of 8 this is.   I
again, didn't ask very well.

Peter, do you have ISOs of the last Solaris 8 release?

RE: Patches

Thanks for finding that that archive was still "alive".  I've downloaded
that patch cluster.
That's a good start at least...

RE: Illumos


>> Also think I might look at Illumos distros, but I really don't see a
solid
>> release there for SPARC,
>> at least not recently.
>
>I agree here.  I appreciate all the work that comes out of Illumos and the
>distro's based on it.  Unfortunately (at least from my perspective) a large
>portion of the upper people are bigoted towards x86/x64 and away from
SPARC.
>Not sure I really understand why.  Yes, you are going to have to dig a bit
if
>you want an Illumos distro on SPARC.

Yeah that bias was fairly obvious after just a few minutes of reading...
The Tribblix distro seemed to be the only real effort doing Sparc work.

>I'm a big *BSD fan myself, and a V120 would probably be a great box for
that
>purpose.  All I could really see you loosing is any commercial SPARC apps,
>assuming you have any.

Yes, that would be the only drawback.  I think I might have a copy of Lotus
1-2-3,
a flight simulator and maybe a Netscape release...but none of those are
"pressing" needs :-)

Being a BSD fan from my first use of 4.1 on a  VAX 11/780 (and all my Sun
OS time...) I was thinking
it might be a better choice. To be honest, Solaris was a hard pill to
swallow after using Sun OS for as long as I had.

I'm also trying to re-bootstrap some drive configurations (and old OS
releases) for the older
Suns.  I had played with tftp'ing NetBSD via a Mac onto the Sun 3/110 with
mixed results.
Wonder if one of the BSD's might make that easier...

RE: Box on Internet

Yeah, should have been MUCH clearer here.  It won't be hanging out on the
Internet.
Behind a bunch of walls... since I sold my IP V4 /24 block I've not had
machines as directly
on the net as I used to. (and the $$ selling a legacy block didn't make it
as painful as I
thought it might be...)   I'm aware that Solaris incorporated some of the
"ip filter chains"
from other OS'es (never remember where they all started....but doesn't
really matter).

RE: /dev/random

I missed that post (didn't quite catch that there was a patch to add
/dev/random from Sun...)
That clarifies it... thanks!

RE: ssh

Yes, I've compiled OpenSSH before on other OS'es, just not Solaris.  So
know it's a solid
solution.  I was more confused by the /dev/random issue and missing that
there was a patch
from Sun was the main reason I was not clear on which SSH solution to
consider.

I actually used a version of OpenSSH for Windows (Microsoft actually
released one).
Not used OS/2 enough to know about that... Mainframes I've always used
various TN3270 connections
which send 3270 data streams via Telnet....not sure how that's secured...
but with a
Z-series running Linux it would be standard SSH.  I've connected to those
using Putty or whatever.

I was thinking out-loud about using the Mouse version.  I might give it a
try to help him out
(if I end up loading Solaris 8 on one of the drives).   The Dropbear SSH
that got mentioned also
looks like a viable option as well.


As always, appreciate the comments and suggestions.   Now that I dug out
the OS this weekend
and started looking for a serial cable (I'm not sure I have one wired
correctly, but have the document
that shows the pin out... so not a big soldering chore).

The plan is to try loading Solaris 8 first, see how that looks.  Then load
NetBSD on the other disk...
going with this, since it seems to have a little stronger Sparc support
(based on what I read...which could
be wrong...never really know 100% until try....

( if I don't like NetBSD, I'm not sure if I should try FreeBSD or
OpenBSD...both look interesting)


Earl