[Koha] Sun Ultra 1 - Good or Bad?

[Vincent McIntyre]

We've found them to be very reliable hardware.

As others mention, noisy.

The fan tends to go out sometime during the lifespan, though the
machine will detect when it is overheating and shut down.

The battery in the NVRAM can die if the machine spends long periods of
time unplugged. These are available, about US$20 apiece I think.

If you want to put solaris8 on them you will have to upgrade the boot
prom, Sun provide a free patch for this. You will find out at this
time if the NVRAM battery is dead.

Much of the noise comes from the vintage disks. Replacing them helps,
though they are scsi so will cost a bit more.

The 21" monitors can be used with PCs running linux, you will need
to buy an adaptor plug (US$50?). X  works once you get the sync
ranges right, but you will probably need to mess around with kernel
framebuffer support to be able to see the text-mode console.

The boxes themselves can run linux, I have not tried this. Debian
linux has good support for the sparc architecture that is unlikely
to go away. The installer probably will handle the framebuffer
question for you.

The graphics card can do 24 and 8-bit visuals simultaneously, which
we find helpful. Not sure if this is supported in linux.

They often come with the 'happy meal' combo card, 100Mbit/s ethernet
plus external wide scsi connector, so you can plug in external disks
for NFS service, etc.

They are slow, but just run and run. Good for low-volume webservers,
dhcp servers, printhosts, and Xterms. Very happy net-booting, so you
may be able to run most of them diskless, which will be quieter.

Do let us know how you get on.
Vince