Learning Sun Solaris?

[groovin]

i used solaris workstations back in college and since then always wanted to learn more about this particular OS. would picking up a used sparc workstation be the best way? i know i can download solaris for intel, but i see ultra 5 and 10 selling at around 100-150 which might be worht getting the whole "feel".

thanks

 

[Nothinman]

Depends, Solaris is Solaris no matter what the architecture. If you want to mess with Sun hardware, get an Ultra10 (I think they're PCI based) if not, grab VMWare and install Solaris x86 inside of it. I personally really like Sun hardware and the OpenBoot firmware they use, it's much better than anything x86 based.

 

[groovin]

thanks nothinman.

 

[n0cmonkey]

They're probably a bit more expensive, but look for an ultra 1 or ultra 2. The ultra 10s and ultra 5s had a crappy IDE chipset, but the 1s and 2s are scsi. The Ultra 10s are nice overall though. I've got an ultra 10/440 (and an ultra 1e, and a couple of sparcstations that are probably close to unsupported in Solaris these days :Q).

Great hardware, decent OS, lots of fun for the whole family.

 

[Nothinman]

Ultra1s and 2s are SBus based though, so no PCI slots.

 

[Sunner]

Yeah, I'm not sure if I'd recommend an Ultra1/2, they're a tad slow, and as Nothinman said, SBus based, which isn't bad in itself, but finding SBus peripherals is rather expensive.
The Ultra5 and 10 are pretty much the same thing, except the 5 is a desktop and the 10 is a tower.
Oh and the 5's case sucks bigtime, AST made them back in the day IIRC.

And to answer the original question, yes I think it would be worth it to get a SPARC box if you're gonna learn Solaris, some things are different, and you'll get to play with Open Boot, which is nice to know.
I'd also try to get my hands on some course material, shouldn't be that hard to come by, and the materials for their Solaris Administration courses, don't know what they're called these days, when I took them they were called SA-238 and SA-288.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Sunner
Yeah, I'm not sure if I'd recommend an Ultra1/2, they're a tad slow, and as Nothinman said, SBus based, which isn't bad in itself, but finding SBus peripherals is rather expensive.
The Ultra5 and 10 are pretty much the same thing, except the 5 is a desktop and the 10 is a tower.
Oh and the 5's case sucks bigtime, AST made them back in the day IIRC.

And to answer the original question, yes I think it would be worth it to get a SPARC box if you're gonna learn Solaris, some things are different, and you'll get to play with Open Boot, which is nice to know.
I'd also try to get my hands on some course material, shouldn't be that hard to come by, and the materials for their Solaris Administration courses, don't know what they're called these days, when I took them they were called SA-238 and SA-288.

The Ultra 10 wins my "worst case ever" award.

 

[dhallid]

I have an ultra 5 - 270MHz 256M ram 9G disk that I bought to learn Solaris. I've been happy with it. It's no rocket though and the IDE disk is Sloooowwww. But if you're just learning, it's fine.

The only thing that I've tried that doesn't work well was loading Oracle 9.2 onto it. Oracle 9i "requires" 512M ram which I don't have, so I was executing out of the swap space slowly and decided to put Oracle 8 back on it.

You might look into getting a E250 server off ebay, they seem to be in that ballpark, but shipping will increase that number more than with a desktop.

 

[groovin]

how out of date are ultra 10's? everything i see on suns site are Sun Fires.

 

[Nothinman]

Sun has documentation on all of their systems on their site, even old EOL systems.

 

[Sunner]

If you wanna speed up an Ultra5/10 or a Blade100/150(the current lowend workstations), your best bet, memory upgrades aside, would be a cheapo SCSI card and a decent SCSI disk IMO.

 

[groovin]

great, ultra10 it is! thanks forum

 

[n0cmonkey]

sunhelp.org is a great place. Check out their recommended vendors or whatever and load up on memory.

 

[salaku]

Utra10 is EOL. But That will be more than enough to learn Solaris. With solaris X86 you may not be able to access the OBP at all. Also You will be more confused with the device names etc. Go with Ultra Sparc II or III. Good Luck.

 

[n0cmonkey]

sparc4m > sparc4u!

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
sparc4m > sparc4u!

You really do have a thing for nostalgica, don't you?

Oh well, back to play with my Amiga

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Sunner

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
sparc4m > sparc4u!

You really do have a thing for nostalgica, don't you?

Oh well, back to play with my Amiga

I'm wierd, I know.