[rescue] Good deal on Netra t1 105

[Robert Novak]

Hi all,

I thought I'd share an opportunity a friend and I took up recently, in
case any of you are looking to get some compact rackmount Ultra hardware.

Qualitek in San Jose, CA has some Netra t1 model 105 servers up on eBay
going for $1100-1300 it seems. A friend in Canada got two, and when his
showed up in good order I picked one up too. 

They're 360MHz (1MB cache I believe), 320MB RAM (256MB+64MB), with 2x9GB
hard drives (one Sun original, one aftermarket from what we've seen so
far). Mine ended up with an 18GB[1] Sun (I didn't complain ;-) ), but my
friend's two were 2x9GB as advertised.

Check out their ebay auctions or drop Sean an email at info at qualitek.net
if you're interested. He had a few left when I was there. Tell him I sent
you... I'm just a very satisfied customer. If the swap meet this weekend
goes poorly and my laptop sells on ebay, I'll probably go back for another
and migrate from my larger systems to these. Gotta get my electric bill
down somehow. 

If you get one (or more), you'll want to update the OBP (all three of ours
shipped with the OBP 3.10.24 1999/08/16 17:37.

The PROM updates are patches 108620 and 108673 (or search sunsolve for
"netra t1 flash"... took me a while to find them). They're not
OS-release-dependent.

You can swap the drives out (I have a pair of 18s in there now) and can
upgrade the memory (at great expense, I expect) to 1GB with either two
512MB mezzanine boards or 4 special 256MB low profile boards. 

--Rob

[1] Format showed them both as 9GB, but probe-scsi showed one as an
obviously 18GB drive. Had to wiggle a bit to relabel it, but it was worth
it. I suspect whoever did the upgrades (the Sun ship sheets said 64MB/9GB)
was cloning the disks and didn't notice the 18GB disk in his pile.

[2] "I have a cunning plan, to get us out of getting killed, sir."

Robert Novak, Indyramp Consulting * rnovak at indyramp.com * indyramp.com/~rnovak
        "And it's been a long December and there's reason to believe
           Maybe this year will be better than the last...." -- counting crows