[Suns-at-Home] E3500

[Ben Lewis]

Hello Folks

I managed to obtain an Enterprise 3500 this week. Quite by chance I  
passed the lab at work and noticed that this machine was in the  
rubbish pile in one corner. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw it  
was being thrown away. It was bought in summer 2000 for a testing  
project for a customer in Germany, we replicated their production  
environment and that meant some heavy duty gear. I spent a good deal  
of my early years at the company installing a huge variety of telco  
software on this machine.

Needless to say I asked the lab admin if I could have it and he said  
yes as it would mean the bill from the waste management agency would  
much lower as they charged by weight. The only thing he asked was  
that I remove the SCSI DVD drive for him as he was having trouble  
locating them as spares for other machines. I managed to get it in  
the back of my car (a Renault Kangoo which I chose for occasions just  
like this!) with the help of a colleague. At home I had to remove all  
the boards and power supplies to make the chassis light enough to  
carry into the house on my own.

It has 4Gb of RAM, 5 x 18Gb disks and six processors. Massive  
overkill for a home machine but it's fun to run even if it's much too  
noisy to leave running over night. If only I had a basement. The good  
thing is that I've been able to turn the heating right off today as  
it's able to warm the whole house! I've temporarily replaced the DVD  
drive with an old double speed Apple SCSI drive (it's always handy to  
keep a couple of these around). That is pretty slow and the Solaris  
10 install took about six hours. I found a Sun SCSI CDROM drive on  
ebay.co.uk for GBP9.99 so hopefully that will speed up CD reading,  
plus its the same colour as the chassis.

I took some pictures :-

http://www.ipcress.net/images/e3500_1.jpg
http://www.ipcress.net/images/e3500_2.jpg
http://www.ipcress.net/images/e3500_3.jpg

I gave it a rather lame hostname of "e3500" but I think its crying  
out to be called "deathstar", "mountdoom" or something equally  
terrifying.

Best regards

Brussels, Belgium

PS If you live in the west of the city and you lights flickered this  
evening that was me rebooting during the Solaris 10 install :)