Building a Sun Yesterday, my housemate and I sat down and built a Sun server. We basically combined parts from all the old Sun machines we’d been collecting and put the best of the best into one machine. In the end, the specs are:
 Our major stumbling point was getting a console on the thing. We couldn’t find a Sun PCI video card to get a console with. So, since Sun servers are amazing, we figured we’d use a serial console. Small problem: the wiring is insane. I had a 9-pin null-modem cable, but the server took 25-pin. I put an 9-to-25-pin adapter on, but then realized the sex was wrong. Finally, the cable was created as follows: Sun -> 25-pin to cat5 -> cat5 -> cat5 to 25-pin -> 25-pin to 9-pin -> null-modem cable -> serial port on other machine. This would have worked fine at first, except I originally used an ethernet cat5. Bad call. For serial, it wanted a 1-1 pin mapping. So, after searching for my crimper, I put some new ends on the wire. This was the last thing that was needed! The terminal emulator we had running on the other machine started getting data and we saw the machine’s open firmware prompt. Now today is being spent loading Solaris 10 onto the machine and figuring out what we actually want to use it for. |
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