The SPARC 20 I found has been hooked up and installed with Solaris 9 (Solaris 10 does not support 32-Bit SPARC). The process was a bit painful because the SCSI drive I was using was not pre-formatted. The installer (very unhelpfully) told me that there were “no disks present”. I dutifully swapped out for another drive only to run into the same issue again. It turns out that the installer really means that it cannot see the drive because it has not been “labelled”. The format -e command took care of that little problem and after some considerable time the install was successful (old CD drives do not make for fast installs).

Eventually I booted it up and logged in but had no Ethernet connectivity – it seems the reason this box had been left for dead is because the onboard Ethernet is dead. Nevermind, EBay has provided me with an SBUS combo card that will do the trick. The cost? All of $7.95

Once that is sorted I will have my first SPARC based system up and running properly. It’s a dual CPU (1MB L2 Cache each) machine with 256MB of RAM and a decent sized 10k RPM SCSI drive so it should certainly be usable. On another Sun related note I managed to pick up an Ultra 60 (as is) for $70, including shipping! Even if there’s nothing more than a CPU and a motherboard, that’s a steal – thank the Lord for Ebay. So there may be some Ultra SPARC fun on the way too.

Besides that, on the more coventional Intel front, I am working on upgrading a bunch of machines to PIII’s from PII’s to see if they’re worth keeping around. I also have a HP Kayak that I’m attempting to get running but the new CPUs I got for it are proving a tough fit. If anyone knows where I can get a tool that removes Slot 1 heatsinks, please let me know

On a SETI related note, I currently have two 3 Ghz Pentium based machines running Seti@Home. One is a “true” dual processor with Hyperthreading running Linux. The other is a Pentium D (dual core) without Hyperthreading running on windows. So far the two machines are runnning neck and neck. I would have expected the true dual CPU machine to have the edge given the HT advantage, so I’m not sure whether this is a damning endictment of SETI@Home performance on Linux, or just evidence that HT doesn’t really give you anything extra for SETI.

The next post will be less geeky and have all the nice pics from the West Coast and as little geekiness as I can manage – I promise.

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