Sun Ultra 10

[Darrin Chandler]

On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 11:28:58PM -0500, fouldragon at aol.com wrote:
> So today I grabbed one of these cute boxes at ASU surplus (it was 
> sitting there, unguarded, with the notation "1Gb RAM, $10", how could I 
> resist? :D)

Nice!

> It's possible that the cable's bad, but can anyone confirm it needs to 
> be a null-modem one before I bother fiddling around with rewiring the 
> cable (it's the kind you can open the ends and rewire the leads.

Yes, you will need a null modem cable. This isn't a funky Sun thing. You
need a null modem or "crossover" cable to switch the tx and rx lines
whenever you hook two computers together without intervening gear.

> Now, of course, the hard disc was pulled.  Will there be any issues 
> with using a standard PC-pulled IDE drive, or any other prep required?  
> Or is it just "insert the Solaris/*BSD/Linux CD, boot from CD, pray"?

I don't know the specs on the Ultra 10, but you can find them online.
Sun's own site has specs, and there are third party sites devoted to
Sun, some of which will even give you OEM equivalents for official Sun
part #'s, etc.

Once you have a compatible drive, you should be able to install your
favorite *nix pretty easily. With a blank drive you'll probably get an
error loading the OS (since there won't be one), and be left at an
OpenBoot prompt. References for that can be found online, too, but in
short you can usually type "boot cd" or "boot floppy" or whatever to
access your installation media.

> Since honestly, I have no good application aside from "WOW!  I remember 
> seeing machines like that when I went to see the tour of a now-defunct 
> dotcom!", the only real thing I'd like to do on it is run a real 
> "commercial Unix feel" desktop like CDE (no, XFCE is NOT good enough) 
> with the modern nicities like Firefox and a post-0.91 version of GIMP.
> 
> If I can't find a good use for it, are there any parts with decent 
> second-uses on regular x86 boxes?
> 
> The RAM I coveted is (cry) 50ns FPM or something...
> 
> There's an interesting card in PCI slot 2:  Looks like SCSI+Ethernet... 
> can it be enjoyed on an x86?

You're probably going to be out of luck trying to pull cards from this
for x86. Even if you can, they'll be older, outdated cards. Enjoy it as
a Sun box! You've only invested $10 in this, and it'll be fun. If you're
missing something and it needs to be official Sun, you can often pick
stuff up on eBay for cheap. If it's not cheap on eBay then wait until it
is.

I have two SparcStation 20s, two Ultra 5s, an E420R, and a Netra T1. The
Netra is actually in use and in a colo. Recently I was using an Ultra 5
as my home desktop machine for several months.

-- 
Darrin Chandler                   |  Phoenix BSD Users Group
dwchandler at stilyagin.com          |  http://bsd.phoenix.az.us/
http://www.stilyagin.com/darrin/  |