[Info-vax] Alphaserver DS10s for sale

[chris]

On 1/16/23 07:37, gah4 wrote:
> On Sunday, January 15, 2023 at 11:27:38 AM UTC-8, chris wrote:
> 
> (snip, I wrote)
> 
>>> My best compuarchaeology buy is a Sun T5220 for $38.13 including shipping.
>>> I do suspect that they might have lost money on that one. It was from a
>>> big computer recycling company, so they only have to make money
>>> on average. Shipping distance wasn't so far, though.
> 
> (snip)
> 
>> I buy too many as well, but allows me to keep up to date on the lab
>> systems at very low cost. Have run a Sun M3000 for 4 or 5 years now.
>> Around 60.00 ukp on Ebay and arrived in a bricked condition, but found
>> an obscure page that showed how to load a failsafe admin image and it
>> all sprang into life. Similar situation with a T4-1 recently, but
>> sold that on after fixing it to defaults. Both fixes took no more
>> than a couple of hours, so well worth the effort.
> 
> I think the M3000 is a little newer than the T5220, though I
> am not sure how they compare.   It came without disks, but
> there are people selling the disks with trays for a low price.
> (Well, they are 146GB disks.)
> 
> But it is supposed to be that SAS is compatible with SATA drives,
> so I might try a modern SATA SSD in that one.    But running
> NFS over gigabit Ethernet works pretty well.
> 
> I also have a Sun 3/E, bought for hobby pricing, which is a 6U
> VME board, additional VME board for SCSI/Ethernet, and a
> VME chassis to hold and power it.
> 
> Years ago, I was working on diskless Sun3 and Sun4 system, so
> it wasn't hard to get it running.  That is the last of the Sun3 models,
> meant for embedded use.  A little more dense than previous models.
> 
> 

The M3000 is the peak of Sun here and have tried quite few of the older
Ultra machines as well. The M series was unusual, for Sun anyway, in
that there is a management monitor, XSCF that talks to each cpu
domain via an internal tcp/ip network. The M3000 is single socket, up
to 4 cores at about 2.6Ghz and has a single domain, but the
other M series can have N processors, N domains. You can reach the obp
monitor for each domain / cpu via the XSCF monitor, which has a whole
raft of functionality for system management, error detection and
logging and more. The fly in the ointment for desktop use is the fact
that there is no usb port to connect a keyboard and mouse, but that
is fixed by using a pci-e usb card, with an hcl supported chipset.
Then, you can put in a sun supported graphics, add a symbolic link to
point to fb0 and voila, a desktop login screen appears. M series was
built by Fujitsu in Japan afiak and that's reflected in the obsessive
attention to detail and functionality of the XSCF management engine,
not to mention the hardware quality. Never needed to be rebooted, or
crashed in 4 years of 24x7 use here, other than for admin reasons.

Firefox performance is not good, never properly sorted before the
development team was shutdown, but otherwise, the fastest Sparc
machine ever used here and worth a look. Solaris 10 is really the
only game in town, though the Debian / Sparc group is active and
busy.

So much interesting hardware around now, much of it at almost scrap
prices...

Chris