unsigned long geek = random();

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).

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.

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.