[Suns-at-Home] http://www.obsolyte.com/

[charshman@divus.org]

On Nov 6, 2007, at 12:00 AM, Ben Lewis wrote:
> Does anyone know what's become of http://www.obsolyte.com/ ?

Wow, that takes me back.  (This is "round 2" for me with Sun  
equipment; back in 2000, at the start of my career, I picked up a  
SPARCstation 4 and later an Ultra 1/140 (still have the latter, in  
addition to an Ultra 10 and a Tadpole Ultrabook), and my then- 
girlfriend picked up an LX (because she wanted to learn UNIX, and the  
LX was "cute").

Used to frequent obsolyte.com, sunsunsun.net, sunhelp.org, and I think  
there was one, blackbox.net or something like that?  (Predominantly  
NeXT oriented, as you might imagine.)

If I had to guess -- I'd say most of these sites were busy places  
around the turn of the century; lots of dot-com dollars made  
impractical "ooh, cool" purchases commonplace, lots of people trying  
to get started with Solaris skills or whathaveyou (Linux was on an  
upswing, but hadn't yet eclipsed Solaris for lots of commodity entry- 
level UNIX server tasks), and the hardware wasn't *that* outdated yet;  
Solaris 8 was (circa 2000) on the horizon, but 2.6 and 7 were  
commonplace and would run quite well on something like a SPARCstation  
Classic.  DEC Multias were still a "thing" in the late 90s, etc.

Flash forward seven years, and any machine that can't be populated  
with 128MB RAM (at least) or more isn't all that useful, even as a  
learning platform.  Solaris 10 (as of 2004) had EOL'd some UltraSPARC  
machines, let alone the old sun4c, sun4m, etc. architectures.

I see on eBay's completed items list a Sun Ultra 10 3D 440MHz /  
512MB / 20GB / KBD,Mouse that sold for $26, 300-333MHz machines that  
sold for $9.99, and a /ton/ of Sun hardware that didn't sell at all.

I think the buying the stuff to jumpstart learning UNIX / networking /  
etc. for a hot dot-com job thing is dead, and the hobbyist thing seems  
to have lost lots of steam.  There just doesn't seem to be that much  
interest, and so maybe the lack of activity on those sites reflects  
that.  That, and the focus of those sites (at least to date) has been  
on machines that could be made to work reasonably well in 2000, but  
are now hopelessly out of date.

Hmm...  Right about that same time (early-mid 2000), RedHat dropped  
support for SPARC architectures (6.2 was the last release), the  
UltraLinux.org site hasn't been updated since mid-2003, etc.  (There  
does appear to be current Linux development for SPARC platforms,  
however.)




> I always go back there for the serial console info
>
> http://www.obsolyte.com/sunFAQ/serial/

Hmm.  They caution vehemently against using a "LapLink" cable, but  
I've used them (coupled with a gender changer) for years without  
issue, connecting a VAIO PCG-Z505R with a port replicator bar, and an  
old Toshiba Tecra 550CDT (Pentium 120 with a built-in 9-pin serial  
port, 16550 UART), to a variety of Suns -- Ultra 1, Ultra 2, Ultra 10,  
SPARCstation 4, SPARCstation LX, SPARCstation 20, and even some big  
(at the time) iron, an Enterprise 420 and an Enterprise 4500.  Have  
never had an issue getting a console up using `minicom` and those  
cables (bought mostly because they were readily sourced from Best Buy  
-- where I worked and had a fat discount ;).  <Shrug>