[Eug-lug] OT: Sun hardware wanted

[Garl Grigsby]

Bill Essig wrote:
> I looking for any old Sun Microsystems hardware anyone would care to 
> donate (or money is good too).
>
> Reason is, I want to diversify and learn Solaris. You know the old 
> saying about keeping your friends close and enemies closer. Anything 
> is good, from the old 133 ultrasparcs to the brand new x86/64 blades ;-)
>
> Also, on the off chance that you all have some SGI/IRIX stuff, that 
> would be cool too.
Bill,
    I might be able to come up with a SGI/IRIX Octane box, but I'll have 
to check into what I've got in the back room.
    Also, just so you know, most of the Big Iron Unix stuff is dying. 
SGI/IRIX is dead at the end of the year, at least officially. 
Practically it's already is dead [1]. SGI is trying to survive on the 
Altix/Linux stuff, but I don't think they have much hope. Too much debt, 
to many bad decisions.
     HP has done the same thing with the PA-RISC processors [2]. They 
are dead. You can still get them, but they are getting rare. Everything 
they are shipping now is Itanium based, but that's got a short life as 
well. I'm fairly certain I heard from our internal development folks 
that they are also planning on killing HP-UX, but they haven't publicly 
announced it yet. Last I looked they were selling less than 30k HP-UX 
licenses a year [3].
    Sun is killing the SPARC processor on everything but high end 
servers (think clusters). All of their low/mid range servers and desktop 
workstations are moving to Opteron. If you want to play with Solaris, do 
it on a x86 based system and download OpenSolaris.
    The only 'Big-Iron' Unix server that is still being actively 
developed is IBM's AIX/PowerPC systems, but again, they aren't selling 
many licenses [3].

HTH,
Garl


[1] http://www.sgi.com/support/mips_irix.html
[2] 
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=164302278
[3] http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug012606-story05.html