Re: Ressurecting an IPX

Congratulations Angus, and welcome in the exclusive IPX Club! :)

Angus Fox (Mac.Com) wrote:
> Thanks to the list I picked up a free IPX. Still my favourite shaped Sun. Time to get it going again.

I also love the form factor. It can be used for almost anything, even as 
the ultimate terminal server:

"Man's ashes laid to rest in computer" (CNET, Oct 2, 2009)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10365289-71.html

My own IPX stands sadly disconnected on top of a bookshelf. I suspect 
the NVRAM battery would be dead by now. I last used it in 2005, serving 
a tiny static website with thttpd running on SunOS 4.1.4. It was quite a 
learning experience porting ssh and other open software back to SunOS.

> What OS should I run on it today. No GUI required. Need good disk utils, like rsync, and smb/afp or nfs networking.

I'd probably go for the OpenBSD SPARC port (openbsd.org/sparc.html), 
which is modern, secure and has support for the sun4c architecture.

> Whats the biggest capacity and fastest type of hard disk I can use with it. It has an external drive which boots nicely but needs a new internal drive. Chiefly I want to use it to copy ageing floppy disks onto a network drive (how the mighty fall eh).

You could easily install a 50-pin 18GB drive like the IBM Ultrastar 18ES 
(DNES-318350). These run cool. They can be found on eBay, although you 
might have to wait a while in order to find the rare 50-pin version for 
a decent price. Some were mounted in external LaCie disks; if you could 
locate one of those, you could probably get it almost for free.

I did a quick search which came up with one "refurbished" hit, at GBP 
104.91 (eBay item #230589091861). A bit expensive.