[rescue] Good deal?

[vintagecoder at aol.com]

>At the Princeton University surplus today I snagged a bargain:
>
> Sun V240 w/ dual 1.5 Ghz CPUs, 8 Gig RAM, and 2x 73 Gig and 2x 142 Gig
> HDs with rack rails (!)

Congrats! Snagging the big drives is a plus. All I have is 73s and it gets
mighty hard to run a ZFS fileserver with "only" 73G of space! My small
boxes are going to be relegated to mail and news servers and test boxes.
The performance is good, even on single threaded work.

> I see the V240 listed at 4-8x what I paid on eBay, but I doubt there is
> an active market in them...

It's interesting. You guys know I am new to Sun and just got an office full
of Sun servers from the same family as your new baby (Sun Fire). I love
these machines, Solaris 10 runs like a dream on them. I see ebay prices all
over the map, sometimes they sell them in lots on pallets, sometimes they
advertise them at sky high prices. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or
reason. Pay what it's worth to you. They're nice boxes and all the doc is
online.

I love my 210s because they're skinny and light, but you have 2x the number
of drives and 2 PSUs on your 240 which makes it a real nice unit. The 1.5
Ultra IIIi CPUs are said to run hot. My 1.3GHz IIIi run about 66/55 but the
ambient temperature in my "server room" right now is 95-100F and my Intel
desktop is idling at 44C. So I guess the cooling is pretty good all things
considered. So far nothing has caught fire.

I don't know how your 240 is laid out, but on the 210 the CPUs are
staggered and the one in back gets nice hot air off the front CPU fan. Not
the most ingenious design but I guess it works. I know Bill hates the 210s
but I love mine. I love all the Sun Fire boxes, I would take a thousand
more if I could.

> I bought it for personal use, but I haven't had a chance to set it
> up/test it yet - any tips, gotchas or caveats before I fire this up? This
> has the ID personality card installed, so it seems 'complete'. 

The even numbered servers (ex. 210, 240, 440) all have cards which I
personally think is safer than nvram chips *but* the default setup is not
to have ethernet management enabled, so you have to use a serial terminal-
unless the one you got was already set up by the previous owner. At my
levels of ALOM I cannot enable ethernet management! In theory it's
possible, and the ALOM 1.6 shows how to do it, it's just that the ALOM
variable doesn't exist at my level of ALOM! 

A super knowledgeable and helpful member on one of the lists who works on
Sun equipment sent me the ALOM and OBP updates but I've been in the middle
of tons of things and haven't had time to go through the install.

I already know from our last email exchange you have the db9/rj45 serial
cables, so all should be well as long as you have an installed system set
to boot on power up or the ALOM userid and password. 

Have fun! You have a great machine there!

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