[Gllug] Sun Sparcstation - is it any use...?

[Ian Northeast]

John Edwards wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 11, 2005 at 09:18:25PM +0100, Nix wrote:
> 

>>But the general consensus seems to be that Netra build quality is lower
>>than that of Suns of old :( and anyway nothing else has failed and it's
>>humming away in the loft now happily.
> 
> 
> Not just the Netra, but the Ultra 5 and Blade 100 machines were 
> more prone to failure. Some might say that this was related to 
> the lower cost and more generic PC parts in them (eg IDE drives).

Seems that way to me too, although my Ultra5 has never failed (apart 
from the time the UTP cable fell out due to lack of locking tab, hardly 
its fault; it's headless like all my Suns so this took several minutes 
of diagnosis:) I don't like the IDE disk. IMHO the Ultra2 is the last 
"proper" Sun workstation to use as a small server.

BTW has anyone used a Sun workstation as an actual workstation? I use an 
Ultra2 running Solaris as my home server and it's excellent, it's well 
built, has onboard SCSI with an external interface so attaching extra 
disks was no problem, it runs headless with just the occasional bit of 
attention from minicom on my Linux desktop (OS upgrades and power cuts), 
the external SCSI tape drive "just works" so backups are no problem. But 
it's a bit slow by modern standards. I prefer Intel/Linux for a desktop.

I forget who mentioned that unplugging the serial cable sends a break. 
It doesn't usually, about 1 time in 4 IME. It depends on exactly how the 
pins disconnect, which is unpredictable. I share a single cable between 
3 Suns and it works fine. You unplug it, then check that the Sun in 
question still works. If it doesn't you were unlucky and it saw a break, 
so plug it back in, type "go" and try again. Sending a break just 
suspends it, it doesn't clear memory or anything. It'll carry on if it's 
told to.

Regards, Ian



-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug