Tuesday 21 November 2006

Sun Ultra1


This computer was adquired about 1995 , and ceased to work about 2004 , it was one of the first machines with a 64 bit sparc CPU . The machine have only 64Mb of RAM , not so much now but enought for a small server (HTTP, SMPT/pop3, FTP) that can also used as personal workstation.

The machine has two internal hard disks and a cdrom , and was updated with an external/low cost SCSI disk to accomodate the "/home" of the users.

The mouse was an optical one, typical of Sun, but not usual for normal Pc users, and the mouse pad was required in order to work with it.

The operating system was solaris 7, unfortunately the system disk is broken so we are waiting for some folk to provide us with a new one .

HP9000 model 850


This is a old machine (it's still running a old HP-UX 6.X operating system) that was used for a long time as laboraty system for C programming and also as central mail server for the computer department.

The machine was shutdown in 1999, after detecting that the operating system was not Y2K compatible, and there were no patch for it ;-), the operating system was from 1988, so it was a long time running.

The operating system lacks of all the Gnu commodities and modern system commodities (no bash, no color ls , user password in the /etc/password file, etc), etc and obsviusly few "normal" init daemons, and was configured to use TCP/IP and X.25 network.

The system is still capable of running (it's currenlty shutdown due to the energy problems in the room ;-), and after changing the password (nice password recovery help in google) I was able to setup a network and connect using telnet to the system.

The first module in the top is the tape unit (sorry , We don't have any tape to test) , the second is the CPU itself and the last one is the Hard disk unit, a lot of noise but they still boot, also we have the monocrome orange terminal that was used for connection to the system.

We are looking for a "modern" HP-UX (at least Y2K compatible) that could be installed in the system, and if possible a spare hard disk to not delete the original HP-UX 6.X operating system (it's a relic by itself ;-).