SunBlade 1000

Hi Folks

My (in)famous Ultra 5 with the pimped blue neon (http://www.ipcress.net/blog/?p=12 
) recently began to throw a PCI bus error on boot which prompted me to  
start looking about for a successor. I suspect it's caused by the heat  
here in my attic lab, it's been up to 33 degrees C already this summer.

Poking around the internet I found that the 1st generation SunBlade  
1000/2000 series looked like an inexpensive worthy successor.  
Unfortunately I'm in Belgium where Sun gear is pretty hard to come by  
on eBay (I've always suspected that the amount of Sun stuff on eBay is  
a good indicator of the state of a countries economy). I found a very  
limited number of UK sellers willing to ship here, there is a huge  
second market in Germany but they almost always refuse to ship outside  
national borders. After some email negotiations I persuaded a seller  
in Dorset, UK to ship to Belgium and I got home from work a couple of  
days later to find a huge package waiting at the neighbours. I'd asked  
them (the seller, not the neighbours) to add a Sun USB keyboard and  
mouse which were almost as expensive as the box itself.

2 x Ultra Sparc III 900Mhz, with 2Gb of RAM, PGX64 and 1 FC-AL 36Gb  
disk, with Solaris 9 pre-installed. It didn't have a DVD drive but I  
found one quite cheap on eBay and have installed Solaris 10 (05/08). I  
rescued an E3500 from being dumped at work a while back. It's really  
too noisy to run all the time but it was packed with FC-AL disks and  
also an internal DDS3 tape drive. I've fitted a second 18Gb disk and  
the tape drive (with luckily the correct bezel colour) from it to the  
SunBlade.

All in all quite a revelation in speed and graphics quality for an  
Ultra 5 owner like me. I've started transferring all my stuff from the  
supermarket bought 80Gb IDE disk that was in the Ultra 5.  It's  
amazing how much baggage you end up accumulating on a machine over a  
few years, it's all the little things like sudo that you miss straight  
away. I've also made the move from CDE to the Java Desktop and Gnome.  
I've managed to find a CDE-motif theme to make it look a bit more like  
home.

The best part is that the Sun logo lights up on the front no need to  
transfer the neon over!

Best regards

Ben

PS If anyone in the Belgium / northern France / southern Holland area  
is looking for some free Sun gear please get in touch. I think I need  
to slim down the fleet. This would be pickup only.

Up for grabs are :-

SparcStation LX
Ultra 1
The E3500 if it's going to a good home.
Ultra 5 (would be for spares only.)
2 x SCSI disk enclosures, Model 611
Assorted SCSI cables