[cctalk] Re: Old UNIX Systems

On May 30, 2013, at 9:16 PM, David Riley <fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote: I have both an E3000 and an E10K. The E10K takes up to 8 240V feeds at up to 15A. I don't think it was ever offered in a 3-phase configuration, but I'd have to revisit the Sun FEH to verify that. It can run on only four of the 8 feeds, though. I don't have enough power at my house to run it, nor the proper facilities to keep it cool. The E10K also requires at least one workstation (called an SSP) to "boot" it. Like the CS6400 and other systems, this system was used to mete out the system boards into domains, and was usually used as a JumpStart server to install the domains. You'd also handle dynamic IO operations from the SSP (eventually you'd use cfgadm within the domains as an alternate option.) The E3000 is the other end of the spectrum; it was the baby of the Enterprise line (not including the E250 and some of the Netra line.) It was the only Enterprise system with internal disks (everything else either needed a special disk board or had some kind of external storage.) It was really designed to be an all-in-one smallish DB, NFS, or Mail server. On the system and IO-board side everything from the E3000 to the E6000 series was the same; the backplanes just got bigger as did the power requirements. The x500-series offered a bump in speed of the IO backplane (I think from like 50Mhz to 83Mhz) while the E3500 was a very different beast from the E3000. The 3000 had SCSI internal, not FC-AL. The 3500 had room for one more system board, so you could shoehorn 8 CPUs (4 system boards) and one IO board in there; the E3000 as limited to 3 boards + one IO board. There are also two revs of sbus IO boards for the Enterprise series. Both have built-in fiber connectors for GBICs, but only the later rev is true FC-AL and control A5000s, or connect to SANs. The early rev was just to connect to the SSA-100s and SSA-200 disk arrays. Some of the sbus IO boards could take Creator frame buffers, too. My E3000 only has six 267Mhz CPUs. Some of the components can be shared among the systems. The E10K had RAM and processors that could be put onto the Enterprise system boards, but the actual system boards are very different among the platforms. sbus and PCI cards could obviously be used in either platform provided you have the right IO cards; I only have an sbus IO card on my E3000 while the E10K has a mixture of PCI and sbus IO. These systems all shipped with and ran Solaris 2.5.1. By the time Solaris 8 and 9 came out, Sun integrated, fixed, and back-ported features from the E10K line to the rest of the Enterprise line, so you could use tools like cfgadm to disable a misbehaving system or IO board in an E3000 or other Enterprise server and pull it out with the system running, and replace it, too! I was given some spares with my E10K, and some of the spares are broken (the post-it with "hoses entire system when used" seemed foreboding.) I'm going to take the CPUs and RAM off that board, put them on one of the E3000 system boards and see if they work in there. Oh, and you don't want to bend the pins on the centerplane. For shipping/moving (I just got my E10K last weekend) we had all the system boards removed. I've prepped them in place, but I'm too scared to lock them into the system. I'm actually going to go back through each board and ensure that it's lined up correctly.