farewell good old fellow

hi good old SUN technologies fellowship !

I just dismantled my old buddy : the memorable Ultra-5, the sweet
can-do-everything box with its lightspeed fast Ultra-SPARC 400 MHz processor
and an excessive RAM of 256 MB !
I removed its cover, got the CD-ROM (4x) out, the 3.5" floppy (well... not so
floppy) diskette drive, and the two PCI connected 3rd-party HDD of 120 GB (the
32bits controller can't address more capacity). The "hme" NIC card that
provided the bloody fast 100 Mbps network connectivity that we longed for in
the era of 10Mbps coax cables. Its narrow-SCSI card allowed me to hook a 24GB
DDS-3 tape drive to the box to do all, really all my backups within a day
timeframe. It had a full suite of audio connectors to even hook a headphone to
the sound read from the audio-CDs that went into the CD-drive. The serial DB25
console port allowed me to work headless with the machine, stuffed on the
attick. It only came down from the attick when someone caused an electricity
cut (typically by cutting the extension cable during hedge cutting...). Then I
took my crossed serial cable to connect the serial port of my PC to its
console port, and enter the famous OBP "boot -s" command to get it into safe
single-user mode and fix the inconsistent filesystems, then stuff it again
onto the attick for another few years of unattended backups serving.
It's ended with a negative evaluation from the boss of the attick, my wife,
about its noise and power consumption. Useless trying to convince her of the
advantages of its 200Watts-only power supply on our electricity bill.
Admitted, I now take backup copies between the two 2-TB HDD drives in my
silent self-assembled x86 based Nexenta server.

Time moves on, I know... still the sweet memories revive, when taking a last
look at its frame with the SUN logo burned on the motherboard.

The last sound my old chap made, was its bump when it collided with the bottom
of the waste container.

Rob
Belgium


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