[rescue] HW && SW observations :: WAS:::2009 prototype Sun system for sale on eBay

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Mon, 12 Sep 2022, Jerry Kemp wrote:

> I'm certainly not suggesting anything nefarious her, but if you watch
> the provided youtube boot up video, You'll see that this system is
> running Solaris 11.3.
>
> Given the date this system is suppose to be from, I was truly
> expecting to see a pre-release version of Solaris 11 Express, custom
> modified for this box, or at least pre-release drivers for new
> hardware.  All I see is the Solaris 11.3 kernel message, with no hint
> of an SRU update.

Amazing things can happen with consistent hardware components, microcode
on actual ROMs/flash, and real firmware instead of the half-hearted
pile of half-baked that plague most arm64 systems or the ever-shifting
standard-of-the-week on amd64.

Sun always managed to coincidentally allow "unsupported" configurations
to Just Work because their buses and firmware were genuine abstraction
layers.  If the parts knew how to talk to each other and Solaris had
drivers, OpenBoot took care of the rest.  When the fundamental pieces
are designed correctly, preventing random configurations from working is
additional effort!

Likely when the engineer took the machine home, it did have a prerelease
version of Solaris on it, but blowing away anything that Sun/Oracle
didn't release generally would've a prudent step in preparing the system
for sale.  That it works is merely a testament to what the greed driving
Oracle stole from us.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke
Austin, TX
USA