Sun Ultra-10 workstations

[rsbriggs]

Decided that I'm going to go ahead and get my Solaris certification. Bought a pair of Ultra-10's off eBay for $99 each. 128 Mb Ram and 9 Gb HDD - they have everything except monitors...

Does anyone have any idea if these take a "normal" monitor of some sort? Any idea what type of RAM they use?

[Bok]

They'll take a normal monitor, I think the RAM is Sun specific, can't remember. I've got one in the attic with a Gb of ram in it (not been turned on for about a year), I'll open it up this afternoon.

Bok

[PCZ]

You can use a standard monitor with them.
The onboard video has a normal 15 pin vga connector.

If you have a creator 3d or similar video card installed then you will need a video lead adaptor as they use the old sun video connector.

Make sure you get the keyboard and mouse with them.
PC keyboards and mice dont work.

The mouse is normally connected to the keyboard and there is only one plug.

The ram is not the same as PC's it is EDO.
You can get it easy enough on Ebay or from Kingston.

The HD is easily upgradeable any IDE drive should work.
I have used drives up to 80gb without any problems.

[rsbriggs]

Yes, I know about the keyboard/mouse oddness, and they both come with them, so that isn't a problem. A quick google shows that various places supply the RAM - somewhere around $170 per 512Mb. (some places have it for $1,000 !!!!????)


I can probably live with the 9GB drives for now, although I may end up adding additional drives or replacing the drives in the course of learning about the boxen.

Bok or PCZ, do you have any "specs" for the RAM? (Meaning enough of a spec that I could type it into an eBay search and find it?)

And of course there is the important question that really needs to be asked:

Are there any DC projects that provide SPARC binaries? :D

[Bok]

D2OL runs under solaris I think, certainly dnet and classic seti do.

Still haven't looked at my box yet.

Bok

[rsbriggs]

Looks like BOINC stuff does, meaning I could probably run Einstein@Home or something similar, too...

No rush on opening up the box, and I do appreciate the offer of doing so...

( You could just ship it to me, and I could open it :D )

[PCZ]

I just did a search on ebay for
Sun ultra memory and got quite a few hits.

Sun ultra 5's and 10's take the same memory.

Dont buy memory for the older sparc 10's and 20's it wont work.
Make sure it is for the ultra and you will be OK.

The memory is 168 pin EDO.
Normally 50 or 60ns.

I try to get 50 ns
You need to install the memory in pairs.

Also
Don't set high expectations for performance from the sparc ultra 5/10's they are slow by modern standards.

[rsbriggs]

PCZ,

So, looking for 50 ns 160 pin EDO. In pairs. Thanks for the info!

Yes, I know they are kind of slow machines - I'm basically just getting them to get some hands on experience with OpenBoot and some of the other SPARC specific stuff I need to get certified.

But... As long as I have them, they might as well be running some DC project in their spare time, eh? :D

[PCZ]

Good luck with the certification.

I'll get one of my Sparcs set up again and have a look at Sol 10, if it can run on an ultra 5.

BTW
The boinc framework might be able to run on Sparc but I don't think any of the projects can.

[rsbriggs]

I'm going to run Solaris 8 on them, since that is the first certification that I'm going for, and the version of the OS that I'm most familiar with. Then I'll "bone up" and take the 8 to 9 upgrade certification. Then I'd like to take the 10 cert whenever it is available.

No rush, though, it's going to take me a couple of months worth of cramming before I can even think about taking part 1 of the Solaris 8 certification test. LOTS of work to do before I'm ready for the tests.....

[Bok]

8 is the last version I'm certified on, though I'm pretty familiar with 9, never tried 10.

Good luck!!

Bok :D

[PCZ]

Bok

You can take the test for Solaris 10 for Free at the moment.
Catch is of course that it is in Beta and it will take ages to get the results.

I am supposed to get certified in Solaris this year but with all the MS and Cisco certs as well it has slipped a bit.

Oh and the Nokia and Checkpoint stuff.

Someone stop the merry go round I want to get off :bang:

[rsbriggs]

With 600+ changes between 9 and 10, and the addition of all the new service stuff, I'd flunk that set of tests, beta or not. No doubt in my mind at all...

Hey - just for fun of it, anyone know how hard an A+ cert is to get, or what it costs to take the test?

[CaptainMooseInc]

All I know is that I could walk in today and take the A+ and Cisco cert tests and pass w/o studying. I was going to take a class available in high school for it but I wanted to tinker around with the Radio/TV class.

Now I know a bunch about computers and I can broadcast over the air and I'm a wicked editor with Adobe Premier 5.5-7.0 (I -hate- FINAL CUT PRO) and love DV. :)

-Jeff