No, I'm talking about the Dc to DC converter on the motherboard that powers the CPU itself. The electrolytic capacitors are bulging, and the ESR is way too high. Two of the capacitors are completely open. The computer tries to come up, then shuts down from the bad caps. It is a common failure on motherboards. I already removed the bad parts. I just have to wait to build a bigger order for different caps before I repair it.
I'll keep you in mind if I need help with it. Its the first Sun I've rescued. I collect orphan computers, like Gunner does with cats & dogs. :)
Both are for SCA (80-pin) interface drives, and allow hot swapping, if you have a way to unmount individual drives from your computer. I've done this from time to time with the Ultra-2 and a
12-slot MultiPack. They are 68-pin SCSI on the outside.
Both have automatic termination of full 16-bit wide SCSI bus, or the upper 8 bits, if you are continuing on through the box to some 8-bit SCSI devices on down the chain. Both are Single-Ended fast wide (ULTRA) SCSI -- though only some of them actually *say* so on the outside. (A friend has tested some which do not say so, and still gotten Ultra-SCSI speeds.
3) D1000 (various flavors which handle either eight 1.6" or twelve 1" drives in a single rack-mount row, split into two 68-pin SCSI buses, or jumpered into one bus, with switches to either put the drives from each half down in the lower SCSI ID block for two 8-bit buses, or one set in the upper SCSI ID block to access them all from a single SCSI bus.
This also uses SCA 80-pin SCSI drives, but provides a HVD (High Voltage Differential) interface to the outside world.
4) A1000 (same box, but with a different internal card, which is hardware RAID, with the right software to talk to it. The software can be downloaded from Sun to talk to it -- but only for Solaris based machines.
There are some newer ones, but I don't know much about them.
The Multipack housings are nicer for this than the D1000, unless you are rack-mounting the drives and the computers.
I don't know what *he* has, but these are what Sun has made available in the past. (Aside from systems which squeeze multiple CPUs and lots of drives into a single box -- intended as a server of course.
It depends on what you want it for. I want it as a web server to replace the Ultra-5 which is currently performing the task. Once I have that, the Ultra-5 will be brought up as a firewall using OpenBSD and pf (packet filter) to build the firewall. I've currently got an older version running in an Ultra-1, and I could reduce the summer Air Conditioning bill using an Ultra-5 instead. But even the Ultra-1 is more than fast enough for that task.
The Ultra-10 will accept (and probably has) a Creator-3D framebuffer (graphics card) which is a pretty good one for many purposes. And it has PCI slots, not sBus slots, so later things like USB cards and LVD SCSI cards are available for it, and not for the Ultra-2 which I am using.
Pretty good. Pick up another machine for a spare power supply.
It uses IDE drives maximum of two internal ones, plus IDE CD-ROM or DVD-ROM) -- not SCSI by default. If you want SCSI, you need to add a PCI bus SCSI host adaptor (and most of them will actually provide two SCSI buses in one card, for a maximum of 30 drives.
As for maximum size -- as a practical matter, 120 GB. The implementation of the IDE interface can go up to 127 GB, IIRC, but 120 is the nearest common size. You can put in a bigger drive, and just not use all of it. :-)
Note that the Ultra-10 which I have cost me $30.00 (with no drive) at a hamfest -- but with a Creator-3D framebuffer, which once sold for well over $1000.00. :-) But I needed to get more RAM for it. It needs SIMMS in pairs, and there was only one in it, which was rather useless. :-)
My Ultra-5 (which uses the same CPU card, but which does not have physical room for the Creator-3D framebuffer cost me $20.00, with two (smaller) IDE drives installed.
Both can run Sun's Solaris-10, OpenBSD, or (probably) many flavors of linux. Solaris-10 is free for the downloading -- but it will take you a while.
Also -- he may be using them to build firewalls. OpenBSD in one of those (with a PCI card offering one or more extra ethernet interfaces) makes a really nice firewall -- and there is no point in going to an Ultra-60 yet, because:
a) The Ultra-10 is plenty fast enough for the task.
b) OpenBSD doesn't yet handle SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) so the extra CPU in the Ultra-60 is wasted.
The U-2 is nice -- and is what I am currently using to type this. Not much difference between the U-2 and the U-60, other than the switch from sBus to PCI (which of course lets you access newer protocols with the right cards which are not available for the sBus.)
Some sBus cards can be really useful. Others are rather specialized.
You might be able to get it to label the disk again and use it, but I would strongly suggest that this is a bad idea.
Hmm ... if you can pick up a UniPack, you can put one of the SCA
36 GB drives externally. Or if you can pick up a MultiPack, you can put up to six of them if the 36 GB drives are 1.6" high, or up to 12 of them if the 36 GB drives are 1" high. (You don't have to fill it, but it is nice to have the extra room for spare drives when some start getting tired, to let you transfer data and then reformat and re-test the ones which are getting tired.
Note that the 12-slit MultiPack skips over SCSI-IDs 0, 1, 6, and
The first two are the internal drives in the Ultra-2, the 6 is the CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive, and 7 is the host adaptor's own address. This leaves 12 addresses for the 12 slots in the 12-slot MultiPack.
It depends on how much disk Blastwave needs to use, and the capacity of the cache processors. They are nice for a disk server which has lots of quick reads and writes. I'm not so sure about the patterns which Blastwave (whatever it is) will use.
And note that if you get a Multipack, the speed of the bus will be the speed of the slowest device on the bus. If you narrow down to an
8-bit SCSI (50-pin instead of 68-pin) that will really slow you down. Get the Multipack, and put in the fastest SCA interface Ultra-SCSI drives you can find.
Thanks Don. Im needing simply file storage. Ive been collecting Ebooks, and scanning machine tool manuals, as well as slides and other pictures, mostly machine tool etc etc. I really dont need application server" ie..running applications off a remote drive. Think of it as big file cabinets I can search. Raid or even mirroring would be pretty nice. I figure Id be golden with about 250-500 gigs of hard storage for the next 5 yrs or so. Since DVD-R drives are now about $30 I figure Ill get one next year and do hard backups.
I dont have a clue where to look for Cheap hard storage..and my contact with a computer recycler has retired for health reasons.
Gunner
"Aren't cats Libertarian? They just want to be left alone. I think our dog is a Democrat, as he is always looking for a handout" Unknown Usnet Poster
Heh, heh, I'm pretty sure my dog is a liberal - he has no balls. Keyton
The biggest drag I just ran into is I have a U2 with no cdrom and thus doesn't have the OEM scsi cable and the dimensions are such that conventional scsi cables won't reach to the cdrom and back.
Yep- in the pile of sbus boards I found a mysterious audio processing board, not even a manufacturer logo on it, and a nice little combo A to D, D to A and digital I/O board. Only missing a (IIRC) 128k dual port sram, I even got a copy of the driver...
I used to buy dual six packs - one for me and the other for IT to mirror my six pack. Just cost me twice. The first time, I got half the disks that I needed.
Martin
Martin H. Eastburn @ home at Lions' Lair with our computer lionslair at consolidated dot net TSRA, Life; NRA LOH & Endowment Member, Golden Eagle, Patriot"s Medal. NRA Second Amendment Task Force Charter Founder IHMSA and NRA Metallic Silhouette maker & member.
O.K. A 6-slot Sun MultiPack can hold six SCA (80-pin) drives, and software RAID-5 can make that equal to the storage of five drives plus a spare drive containing the necessary information to allow any single drive to fail without losing any data. And plug in a replacement drive (and perhaps format it), and you can then let the system re-build what should have been on that drive to bring you back to the same level of fault tolerance. All of this can be done without even having to power down anything. They are hot swappable. Use 50 GB drives, and you are at your minimum 250 GB you have listed above.
The nuisance is that you have to get Sun "spuds" (special carriers) for the drives, to allow them to mount in the MultiPack. (The same spuds fit the various SCSI Ultra machines, and the A-1000/D-1000 boxes, FWIW.
And these do not *have* to be used in servers -- though it is nice to share the space with the rest of your computers over the net.
Well ... I get some from eBay, some from hamfests, and some from a local recycler -- but you just got a link to Weird Stuff, which I have visited once when I was in the area. The prices seem to be on the order of what eBay prices are when you add in shipping -- and they are closer to you than anyplace where I get drives and such.
Note that the 36GB drives which they have are not that much more than their price for the 9GB drives, so go for the bigger ones. :-)
Hmm ... you can use a SCSI CD-ROM or DVD-ROM externally if you wish.
But IIRC, the cable is a normal 50-pin with three IDC connectors on it -- two at the system board, and one in the middle for the CD or DVD ROM. (Standard with a DVD-ROM, IIRC.)
Don't you have the ability to crimp IDC connectors on 50-pin ribbon cable? I do. (I'm trying to remember whether the cable is pure ribbon cable, or woven twisted pair. I do remember that it is squeezed down to a round profile at points in its routing. Send me an e-mail and I can check the spare U2 box (not enough RAM to run that one in a worthwhile mode, so it is there to swap in if something fails which needs a U2). If it uses real ribbon cable, I can probably even make a cable for you.
Essentially, it takes the lower half of the 68-pin wide bus and loops it up past the CD-ROM drive and back to where it goes out the back of the system.
You can also get tiny cards by Acard which will allow you to use an IDE drive on the SCSI bus. Make sure to get a 50-pin version for the internal drive, or you will get some very confused software, which will negotiate a wide SCSI, and then fail when only the narrow part works. :-)
I'm using such a setup to drive a DVD-ROM burner, while using a standard SCSI DVD-ROM reader in the system box.
Interesting. Among those which I have are some PrestoServe cards (which need new battery bricks on them, and a driver which understands and will install in a Solaris 10 system), which are cacheing for disk writes. I've seen one at work on an active server help a tray with four large (for the time) SCSI drives being power cycled by a bored little girl waiting for her father to get an old 9-track tape mounted and read. After getting her away from the power switch, I sat there and ran "fsck -n" on the drives and watched them getting better and better.
I've also got some dual PCMCIA slots, some GPIB cards (without drivers), some video cards, and one four SYNC/ASYNC serial port card (by Magma). Also one card for which I've never figured out the purpose.
Sure I could make a ribbon cable but no particular need to- I had the cdrom-less U2 and a dual 360 U60, so excessed the U2. It was really my own fault, I picked up the U2 without examining it closely.
I had a few of the pcmcia slot boards too, but traded them off to the guy who wanted my old SS10. I eventually tracked down a Turbo XGX which remains a pretty decent sbus vid board, though only 8 bit color- now in use in a quad Ross 125 SS20 clone. At work I have an Ultra 1 with a 8 port serial board, and I found one of the boxes w/ the dsub ports on ebay, connected the two with a cable from an sbus extender box- thankfully all pins thru and the right connectors. After replacing the cpu fan it works great- its a nfs root & terminal server for a rack of headless PPC Linux boxes.
Have you ever measured performance improvements when replacing an old
5400/7200 rpm drive w/ a 10k on a relatively slow system? I'm looking for ways to speed up the SS20 system and figured an drive upgrade might help- 10k 9gig drives are pretty cheap and I have a connector adaptor.
O.K. The U60 has the advantage of having separate SCSI busses for the internal (two disks plus CD-ROM/DVD-ROM) and for the external (thus 15 complete drives possible on that bus, with no worries about collisions with the internal drives.
[ ... ]
I got mine from eBay for use with reading CF cards from my cameras through a PCMCIA adaptor. Now, I'm using a SCSI PCMCIA "drive" for the purpose -- which has the advantage that it can be accessed without working my way around to the back of the system. :-) That is connected to an sBus 50-pin SCSI host adaptor along with a DVD burner, an Exabyte 8505 8mm tape drive, and an Exabyte Mammoth-1 8mm tape drive.
O.K. Until recently, I was using two dual ROSS cpu cards in an SS-10 -- but since they did not have cache, I had to run them from SunOs
4.1.4, not any of the Solaris 2 variants. They were the slowest CPUs in anything I was running at the time, but as a four CPU system, the machine did better under a news flood attack than a faster Solaris system with only one CPU. (The latter was brought to its knees by the attack.)
So -- I'm not the only one to experience a dying fan in an Ultra-1. (140 MHZ version, wasn't it?) I wound up digging through DigiKey and Mouser and found a fan of the same voltage and dimensions, with the choice of Oilite style bearings or ball bearings, and I got the Ball bearing version -- two of them, and so far I have not needed to put in the second fan. (That system is going to be retired when I get the next Ultra-10, thus moving the Ultra-5 from web server to firewall duty, and drawing a lot less power than with the Ultra-1. :-)
IIRC -- it is only the slower CPU on the Ultra 1 which has a fan. The faster version has no CPU fan -- just good airflow from the power supply. And the slower one does not have the slot for the fancier
24-bit framebuffers like the Creator-3D.
Though there was the "graphics tower" which connected to an sBus card (and the rest lived in the same housing as the Sun 3/140 (3 VME board slots). I never had that one -- it seemed to be just too much space and power to be worthwhile. :-)
I've never really been that concerned with disk speed. What I have has always been fast enough. The Ultra-5 and Ultra-10 systems are (of course) supplied with IDE, so that is what I am using. The rest have a mix of whatever SCSI drives I can find. (The old SS-10 with eight 50-pin drives will probably be retired soon, and replaced with an Ultra-60.)
Isn't it nice how affordable these systems are these days? :-)
I had a 4x55mhz Supersparc SS10 for a while. The Quad 125 Hypersparc does better... :)
The Ultra 1 at work is a 170mhz w/ cpu fan and Creator 3d. I have a 2nd Ultra 1 acting as a backup server out at my dad's, that is 170mhz as well but does not have a cpu fan.
I've thought about them a few times.. but scored a 100 tape ATL library w/ 7 dlt drives instead.
I love it... :)
The Hyperstation SS20 clone lets you adjust the mbus and memory bus speeds, I have them at max (took a bit of fiddling to find ram that would handle it). I never thought the 100baseT/scsi combo sbus boards made a lot of sense until I realized the SS20 only has 10baseT onboard. The only thing left to speed up is the hard disk.
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