If you are looking for Sun parts, call Phoenix Technology Group, 
602-485-9500.  The are mostly mail order/eBay, but have been know to 
sell direct to the public.

Ask for Greg, and let him know I referred you.

George Toft, CISSP, MSIS
623-203-1760




Darrin Chandler wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 11:28:58PM -0500, fouldragon@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.
> 
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