[geeks] Sun stuff on auction locally

[geeks at sunhelp.org]

While everyone else is jawing about semantics....

I highly recommend the SparcStation 5's and they are, IMHO, the best of the
bunch at this auction. You will probably want more ram and disk though. The
SS5 is modern enough that you won't have to go begging for parts, yet old
enough to be worth very small dollars (maybe $30 to $90 depending on CPU,
+$25 to +$50 more with monitor). They are SBus machines and use most of the
SBus cards. They *can* be fast enough to run Solaris 8 (get lots of RAM and
a TGX+ frame buffer). They come in models ranging from a 80mhz processor to
a 170Mhz processor (my favorite). The 110Mhz is no slouch either. They use
SCSI disks with SCA interfaces (not the more common 50 pin "IDE" type
connector).

The 630MP is something I lust after, but it is a VME bus machine and parts
are fairly hard to find, except on the Sunhelp lists. It isn't very fast, it
isn't meant to be a workstation and is large/power hungry. It also has some
Solaris version limitations (I don't know for sure, but I seem to recall
that after Solaris 6 you run into problems). However, as a server they are
still a nice machine to have, and if you judge computing power by the pound,
its a killer. Again, they sell from zero dollars to maybe $500.00. Its not
uncommon to find companies begging someone to haul them away for free, as
they have almost no modern use and are expensive to send to the trash. One
nice thing about this beast is that it is a multi-processor machine.

The Cycle machines I am unfamiliar with. I seem to recall that they use a
clone motherboard, maybe with a Ross CPU.

If this auction is within a 4 hour drive of Central New Hampshire I might be
interested in having you bid on a 630MP for me. Let me know.

James Fogg, Network Engineer
Vicinity Corporation - New Hampshire
(603) 442-1751