unsigned long geek = random();

After sending this information to various mailing lists over the last few months, I thought I’d add it here for those who don’t rely on the LazyWeb…

The Sun Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 are almost identical. They share the same motherboard, only the PCI backplane and case differ. Unlike most Sun machines of that vintage, they take fairly standard RAM – 168-pin 3.3V ECC EDO DIMMs, common in x86 servers of the time. The motherboard has four slots, but due to the size of the Ultra 5′s case it can typically not take 256MiB DIMMs – unless they’re half height or staggered DIMMs, they won’t fit. Although the Ultra 5 officially supports a maximum of 512MiB RAM, 4x256MiB DIMMs will work fine if they’ll fit.

My one Ultra 5 has 4x128M Compaq DIMMs, bought on eBay for $38, and they work fine (the machine has been rock solid since I added the RAM).

For reference, the RAM is Compaq part number 169234-002, supported by the following servers:

• Proliant 4000
• Proliant 5000
• Proliant 6000 6/200, Model 1
• Proliant 6000 Xeon 6/400, 6/450, and 6/500, Model 1/2S
• Proliant 6500r
• Proliant 7000 6/200 Models 1S/2S
• Proliant 7000 Xeon 6/400, 6/450, and 6/500 Models 1, 1S, 2S

I received a mail from Steve Rikli on Tuesday to say that he’s finally managed to get USPS to ship me a SPARCstation 5 (170Mhz TurboSPARC model) that he has surplus. To be honest, I probably have way too many old RISC workstations cluttering my server room, but I have a soft spot for any and all Sun hardware.

Like all my SPARC machines, it’ll get an installation of NetBSD/sparc when it arrives (hopefully in 6-8 weeks – the joys of surface shipping).

Two weeks ago I picked up an old Xylogics microAnnex els console server from a member of our local LUG for R100 (about $15). It’s a nice device that allows me to access my server consoles via serial port across the network, which is something I’ve been needing for a long time. It’s fairly old (as with most of my hardware) and, being a 1993 vintage device, doesn’t support ssh – access is via telnet only. Once I have it cabled up properly, I’m going to hook it up to another machine via crossover ethernet cable and ssh into that machine before telnetting to the various consoles.

Jason Heiss has a page detailing some useful info for new Annex owners, including how to reset the superuser password. Unfortunately my Annex had a non-default password and the original owner couldn’t remember it, so I had to erase my flash from the monitor in order to reset the password. I was a little hesisitant, but the Annex was straightforward to reconfigure after the erase.

For information on wiring cables for the various Annexes (Annexen?), see the conserver site.

In early March I bought myself an Ultra 2 on eBay for $102.50. Not a bad deal, I think – 2x200Mhz UltraSPARC-I CPUs, 512M RAM, 2x18G drives, qfe, CG6 and SBus Ethernet/Fast SCSI. Unfortunately, trying to get the machine to me was another story…

The seller (natbray) agreed to ship it to me using USPS (as UPS and FedEx are far too expensive), but unfortunately the box was too big. USPS have some very strange rules about package size – a maximum girthof 78″ is all they’ll allow. After numerous trips to the post office, the seller still couldn’t convince them to ship it to me. I had eventually decided that there was no way I was going to get it, and was at the point of asking the seller for a refund, when a friend made an arrangement to have it freighted to South Africa by a friend of a friend.

On Monday the machine finally arrived in Cape Town and I collected it from the airport. Everything was in one piece and the machine seems to be working fine. Two nice bonuses: the drives are 10,000rpm Seagate Cheetahs and it seems the motherboard is recent enough to handle an upgrade to 300Mhz UltraSPARC-II CPUs (unfortunately it’s not new enough to handle 400Mhz CPUs).

Both NetBSD 2.0.2 and 3.0_BETA boot fine and last night I installed Solaris 9 onto it temporarily in order to update the PROM. For some odd reason, the PROM update would not even start when booted via tftp. Very strange, considering that the machine boots the NetBSD installer via tftp without problem.

On Monday I finally acquired my first Silicon Graphics machine – an O2. It cost me only R500 (about $85) for a machine with a 150Mhz R10000 CPU, 128M RAM, 2x4G SCSI drives and a 2G tape drive. It also came with IRIX 6.3 and 6.5 media, which is great.

Unfortunately none of the open source operating systems support SGI machines well – NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux all have ports, but none have full hardware support or have stability problems. I’ll therefore be using IRIX for the moment (yay! /usr/etc/ifconfig here I come!).

Yesterday I bought a 10,000 rpm 18G Fujitsu SCA drive from Bridgeport to replace the internal 4G drive. I’m still looking for more RAM (preferably another 4x128M DIMMs to take the machine up to 640M). Unfortunately the RAM is rather pricey, even on eBay.

Some useful SGI links:

• Nekochan – be sure to check out the forums
• O2 information at Obsolete
• FutureTech SGI Technical Advice and Data – very comprehensive

For those interested: hinv output.

I got myself a new phone yesterday – a Sony Ericsson P910i. It seems to be quite an upgrade from my P800, even though they have a fair amount of common hardware (including the CPU). The screen is much better – 256K colours instead of 4096 and the “GameBoy” effect of the P800 display is gone. Yay! There seem to be minor improvements everywhere, including T9 predictive text support and the ability to create folders for SMSs. How the P800 could have been released without T9 I have no idea. I’m still busy moving my applications, ebooks, etc across and configuring the P910i to my liking, a slow and painful process.

As much as I like the Px00 series phones, they have a few “features” that some find too annoying to work around. I agree that they aren’t perfect, but I think they’re the best family of smartphones current available.

One thing that’s pretty cool – I managed to get a R1,000 ($170) discount on the phone after moaning that the amount I’d have to pay in was too high. Thanks Vodacom Service Provider Company.

More comments in a few weeks once I’ve used the phone more.

I’m sure this is old news, but I spotted something interesting in a Samsung brochure I received in the mail last week – quite a few of their newer DVD players support DivX. I’m pretty surprised that a major manufacturer of consumer electronics is supporting a format that has such a chequered history, but kudos to them. For more info, check out the Samsung site. If you are a Samsung DVD player owner, they are offering a firmware upgrade for some of their DVD players which adds DivX support.

On a related note, I see a few of their portable music players (like the Yepp) support Ogg Vorbis.

Got a mail today from Magma:

End of Life Announcement

MAGMA SBus Connectivity Products

DATE: July 26, 2004

FROM: MAGMA, Inc. Manufacturer of SBus Connectivity Products

SUBJECT: Product Obsolescence Plan for SBus Connectivity Products

NOTICE: MAGMA, Inc. is announcing the End-of-Life (EOL) of their entire
SBus connectivity product line:

* Last Time Buy Date: September 30, 2004
* End of Life Date: December 31, 2004
* All orders must ship by December 31, 2004

Boo! I have two of their 4 port SBus serial cards in two of my SPARCstation 2s at home and they’re very cool pieces of hardware. I haven’t used them under SunOS or Solaris, but NetBSD supports ‘em just fine.

Luckily I got mine free – I see they still sell them for a song ($435 according to their price list). HTF they can charge so much for SBus parts in this day and age, I don’t know… Sun’s last SBus machine was the Ultra2, which was last shipped in August 2000.