SETI at home (ca. 2000) servers heading to salvage.

[Sytse van Slooten]

Ah setiathome. Those systems in the photo will have handled a lot of my personal data - well, compared to random other earthlings.

I don't really have fond memories of that series of Sun Enterprise though - what are they, 3000 or 3500? Many a times that I stubbed my toes on that v-shaped thing protruding off the back side. Those systems only made sense for a cluster because they lacked internal reliability and power supply reduncancy - but cluster software back then didn't work too well, and I'm not sure anyone actually used that series as it was intended from the design - always as a cluster. Anyway, lots of very heavy metal frames, good enough to stub your toes on for sure - what I've come to call 'a stable platform' ie something you can put your weight on without worrying. 

Main issue for the 3000/3500 series were the power supplies as I recall, if you didn't get lucky, a 3500 would be a lot less reliable than a 250 - that didn't have all of the extra whoohow, but would work fine even after unbelievable abuse.

Anyway, I still have some of the heatsinks that dropped off the several 3500 I had the privilege of knowing - one of them is now glued to the cpu of my spare server board.


> On 3 Apr 2022, at 17:51, Eric J. Korpela via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> From here:
> https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=85870&postid=2096776#2096776
> 
> They are bog standard Sun Enterprise systems, drive removed and destroyed
> for privacy reason.  They are only interesting for what they've done.  By
> university rules, our group can essentially "permanent loan" them to a
> non-profit, but any sale or transfer of ownership is up to
> University Excess and Salvage.
> 
> A bit of history disappearing, which is nothing new in this group.