When I got home last night, I saw that "ilo", the Sun Ultra 2 that Phil got me, had arrived. I took it with me to school this morning and installed OpenBSD on it. I had worried when I read the install notes that the firmware would need to be updated (which creates a horrible chicken-and-egg problem because you have to have an operating system installed to flash the firmware). At first, I couldn't get the CD drive to close, but then saw that the tray was sticking and with a little poke, it would close just fine. Then it wouldn't boot from the CD I'd burned and I began to sweat. But then I decided that maybe it was just that the old drive couldn't read a CDRW, so I burned the image onto a CD, and it booted just fine. Using a few minutes here and a few minutes there over the course of the day, in between the almost continuous meetings, and by the afternoon, I had it up and running. Now I need to get it a big disk. Unfortunately, it requires SCSI drives with Sun mounting hardware, which is going to make getting a drive for it expensive. Still, I think it will make a much more satisfactory server than the little x86 box I've used for the past several years. I'm tempted to get more RAM and another processor, but in point of fact, I expect it would be overkill. I can't imagine being RAM or processor bound in any task I'm likely to give it: reliability is what Muppyville needs, not blinding speed.


StevenBrewer