OT - Free Sun servers

I haven't seen any posts from him for a while but there was a guy here that fixed old computers and gave them to veterans.

He could probably use all the PC parts, especially IDE drives and memory, that you care to ship.

I think I have his email addy, I'll try to contact him.

technomaNge

I'll answer here because my newsreader runs on a system not authorized for e-mail sending, so copying to where I could send it as e-mail is a bit more trouble than I really want to go do here. If you're reading on a newsreader which is on a mail-capable system, and feel that you need to reply privately, my e-mail above is valid.

Hmm ... a bit far from the East Coast. Me dropping by is not likely an option.

Hmm ... I've already retired Ultra-2s and Ultra-60s. The E450 and E250 are probably a bit big for my use. I'm using a Sun Fire 280R as my main file server.

Hmm ... are the A5200s FC-AL in both the drives and the interface to the computer? They are a bit newer than anything I had access to while I was working.

How big are the FC-AL drives? I'm currently using a mix of 36 GB, 72 GB, and 146 GB ones. If they are 72 GB or 146 GB, I could be interested in the drives, even perhaps without the arrays.

O.K. Looking at the FEH pages for the 5200, it could have come with as large as 73 GB drives, which would be large enough to be serious temptation.

And if not -- just the 5200 would be lighter to ship. I can pick up FC-AL drives locally from time to time. (I lucked into a batch of 15 of the 73 GB ones at a hamfest last summer -- even though they had been formatted in a DELL RAID system, and had weird sector sizes which made it more difficult to format it all -- but they all formatted.

No need there for me, at least. Both the SB-2000s and the SF-280R have their own built-in FC-AL interface.

Running three "raidz2" ZFS arrays at present -- two with 72 GB drives, one with 36 GB drives, which I would like to expand to larger drives. But I think that the A5200 might be a little less heat and sound level than what I am current running -- some EuroLogic rack-mount arrays.

As long as it works -- I don't worry about appearance. :-)

Posted here, for the reasons given above, but I'll happily receive an e-mail reply if it is easy for you to switch over at your end.

Washington DC area? :-) (Probably not.)

Mostly Sun stuff -- but newer than the Ultra-2s these days. I do run a couple of Ultra-10s as web servers, with OpenBSD as the OS. Solaris 10 on most of the remaining systems, and a firewall on an Ultra-5 with the same OS. But both my wife and I are using SB-2000s, and the SF-280r for the server, plus a SB-1000 for experimentation.

So -- e-mail me with the size of the drives, and the costs for shipping the A5200 both empty and full (depending on the size of the drives. 73 GB or larger, yes. 36 GB or smaller, just the empty 5200, perhaps with spuds included. That's where the cost of shipping vs the capacity vs heat output tradeoff of the drives folds for me at present.

Oh yes -- and a few copper FC-AL cables would be nice.

Thanks, DoN.

Where are you located? California????

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire. Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us) off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the shit out of you for torturing the cat." Gunner

Yup, just like I said in the original post. Pasadena, California area. I'm right off the 210.

Followups to the newsgroup is fine. E-mail is really only necessary for exchanging shipping addresses or something like that.

The E250 wouldn't be that bad, but if you already have a 280R there's probably not much use in the E250. More drive bays, maybe, but that's about it. I have a 420R I'll probably be retiring soon that might be useful (I think it's fully loaded with CPUs and memory) but I'm not sure exactly when that's going to go.

They're actual Fibre Channel drives, and the array itself is FC-AL out the back. You can talk to it with either the Sun FC-AL cards or with a regular FC card on a point-to-point connection, but the array wasn't too happy about being in a full fabric environment. Once it's attached to the server, it presents itself as just a bunch of drives addressable by the WWN of the drive. Basically, it's a Fibre Channel JBOD. But I think you can chain the arrays together, so you can access a lot of disk without being in a full fabric environment.

They're small. I've got 9GB, 18GB, and maybe some 36GB. Definitely nothing in the 72GB or larger range. As far as quantity... I stopped counting when I got to 65. I know there's a whole box of them back there someplace I didn't include, so I thought "plenty" was a suitable unit of measure at that point. But again, the bulk of them are 9GB and 18GB.

I don't know, those A5200s crank out some serious heat. They're quiet, sure, but heatwise they throw off plenty. Mostly it's the fault of the disks, though.

I feel the same way about the women I date.

I'd be shipping it UPS, I'll have to ask the people who handle shipping if I can borrow a scale from them. An empty A5200 would still be pretty heavy. Ours came shipped bolted to a wood pallet, so I can't imagine it being the sort of thing that will be inexpensive when wrapped in bubble wrap and stuffed in a box. Still, I'll check with them and see what they say.

(Sorry about not e-mailing this reply, but I figured it might answer some questions others would have.)

These are all optical fiber devices with SC connectors on them. No copper, sorry. I should have at least two cables for each unit, and I know I've got at least one cable that I think is a 60 meter cable with SC connectors I don't need. So if nothing else, I suppose you could put the drives on the other side of the house if the heat and noise were a problem.

I go by there at least 3 times a week.

Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire. Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us) off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the shit out of you for torturing the cat." Gunner

See post from Michael Terrell downthread. If you can help him, I can paypal you 25 bucks to cover part of the shipping.

Reply here and I'll contact you via email.

technomaNge

An empty A5200 weighs 85 pounds, and you can probably tack on another pound or so per disk. I haven't heard from the shipping people here yet as to what the actual cost would be, but I'm pretty sure it won't be terribly cheap since it is such a heavy item. I found an online UPS calculator that gives an estimate of $156, but I had to scale down the measurements to fit their restrictions so I'm sure it'll be more expensive than that. If that sounds like something you're willing to work with, let me know.