--- jamesd <jdickens(a)ameritech.net> wrote: The Sun racks that I am familiar with are much wider than 19" (there's an internal 19"-spaced rack, with stuff on both sides) about 60" tall. That optical storage rack looks like a somewhat standard 72"-tall rack. You *might* be able to move it in an Explorer. I've moved two (empty) H960 racks in a VW Microbus (the contents were placed under the racks, on the floor behind the driver's seat, and I've moved an 11/750 in a Chevy Astro, but what you've won is a bit larger than either. Linux for SPARC is a dog. It runs, but for certain architectures (sun4c especially, which is a little newer than yours), it's vastly sub- optimal. Given the age of the equipment, nobody wants to fix the problem, either. If you aren't going to run Solaris, I'd recommend *BSD. ISTR the 690 might take a 220V plug. I am not a wiring genius, but I have assembled a few 30A 110V plugs and one 208-3phase for a VAX 8530. Not sure. There are extensive discussions on this list about that very topic. OTOH, I *think* the innards of the 690 are 110V, but the power distribution box might want 220. In that case, you can plug the CPU into its own 15A circuit and run the rest of the stuff off of a different circuit. I can understand that. This stuff wasn't exactly designed for home use. -ethan

On Wednesday 04 June 2003 08:38 am, Fred N. van Kempen wrote: yeah 2x 15A curcuits would not be a problem, but i think it might be 220v to the power supply and from then on the rest is just DC lines to each component, begining to think I should just forget about the whole deal, not worth the 500mile round trip drive and a hernia of moving a 600 lbs. beast... I figured out what i thougt was a masive powersupply drawer was really holding 5 or so Full Height SCSI drives that were either 1. 3. or 9 gig's each not really econmical to use these days given when the power to run them costs. especially if they are the 1 or 3 gig variety that's a damm scary place to live as a child or a electrian... my son when he was about 3 thought it would be find to pee on a electrical outlet all it happened back then was sparks and smoke hate to think about what would happened at 380 or 500 vac? I ran over a extension cord on a electric lawn mower, i know an evil device, got quite a shock and it was only 110 15A curcuit i shiver to think of even 220v at 60A, i could of been dead with that much power going through me even for a short time i felt my shock...

jamesd wrote: Wow, thats even farther than it would be for me. I'm at 370 miles. Those drives are very nice reliable drives, though. Chad Fernandez Michigan, USA

--- jamesd <jdickens(a)ameritech.net> wrote: Was? I thought you hadn't gone yet. I was going to say... all this talk about old Sun hardware and I'm minded to ask if you do go and you don't want to haul the 4/6xx, if you'd pull the CPU board and ship it to me for a reasonable amount. I still have this 3/60 case here... -ethan

--- jamesd <jdickens(a)ameritech.net> wrote: That's typical of later VME Sun cages. There's so much you can load onto the CPU board that unless you have wierd comms needs, there's not much call for VME peripherals. Bet it's the NVRAM battery. Yes. Typical of a Sun box. That seemed clear from the pictures on the auction... an *empty* 6' rack is between 75 and 125lbs, depending on skins, doors, etc. The seller should have been kind to bidders and mentioned the physical scope of it (for the unwary), but many of us on the list have made road-trips just as you describe: hundreds of miles for hundreds of lbs of gear. Probably not. I've won an auction or two that I offered to pay the bid price and not the shipping and let the seller keep the item and re-list it. Make most sense when the shipping is several times the cost of the item (and I've found it locally before the auction closed for less than the advertised S&H). It's likely to be a fixed-scan monitor, so if you were planning on using it for your PC, it's a bad match. I happen to have a Sun 20E20 which _does_ sync up to ordinary machines, but it has a 13W3 connector (I was able to scrounge the requisite adapter locally) meaning that unadapted, it won't physically fit on consumer-grade hardware (and some newer Sun hardware). I was happy to find that 20E20 at the local Uni surplus depot for $20. Its 17" little-brother ($15) is on my SPARC5. The optical-drive SCSI cabinet looked like it would be fun to play with. We installed one like that at Lucent about 5 years ago. Very expensive. -ethan

jamesd wrote: Oh that was round trip? I didn't see that part. 370 was one way for me :-) Chad Fernandez Michigan, USA

--- Jochen Kunz <jkunz(a)unixag-kl.fh-kl.de> wrote: Oh... I was thinking that the 4/6xx was a straight sun4, not sun4m or sun4d, etc. I do know the difference in the desktop line - my present home server is a SPARC5/110 (sun4m) that replaced a SPARCclassic and a SPARC-LX that preceeded it (as an aside, I've been attempting to surf lately on a Classic with Netscape 4.7... one word comes to mind... Ow!) I do recall there being a patch for a later version of Solaris (wasn't sure if it was 7 or 8), because all they did was to test the processor type early on and halt if it was a VME cage. Sun threatened to remove driver support for VME devices, but I don't know if the ever followed through with it. I looked at putting a large VME CPU in a 3/60 case... isn't there an issue with power distribution - i.e. the 4/6xx CPU depends on being in a real VME cage to get all the power pins lit up, and the 3/60 case only has one live connector. I think the 3/110 was the smallest chassis I heard of used to hold an unmodified 4/6xx CPU board. Naturally. I wouldn't have several 42" racks of DEC equipment in my basement (plus many 72" racks elsewhere) if I didn't think big stuff was fun! -ethan

--- Jochen Kunz <jkunz(a)unixag-kl.fh-kl.de> wrote: It is. OTOH, I paid $5 for it several years ago (diskless with 24MB of RAM and a password-protected NVRAM ;-) At the same time, a SS5 was running around $150-$300, depending on what add-ons were under the hood. By comparison, SS5s were $35-$50 at Dayton last year, as were SS10s and SS20s this year. Double the raw MIPS, but not really any faster in practice. The advantage is a) memory size (128MB max vs 64MB) and compatibility with later versions of Solaris (because it's a sun4m, not a sun4c). The OpenBoot PROM is newer, but that matters little when running. No speed daemon, but the Classic has a little more longevity than an IPX. *That* was it. Thanks. I had wanted to test the 4/6xx, but for reasons I don't recall, I wasn't able to use a framebuffer (I know I had plenty of CG3 and CG6 cards lying around). In the end, I gave up and swapped that 4/6xx board for a couple of IPXs and some assorted accessories. I did later sell the IPXs for a fair sheckel, so I think I came out on top of the deal. The 4/6xx board had 0MB of RAM and an old Ross CPU, so it wasn't exactly the most valuable thing at the time, but I'm not sure I would trade it now if I had it to do all over again. Nope... my max power requirements at home are satisfied by a 30A 110V single-phase receptacle (installed) and a 20A 110V outlet (for the DEC 4000-710 - not yet installed). Everything else just plugs into ordinary wall sockets. -ethan