I have a friend in Illinois who likes Sun hardware, preferably running OpenBSD. We used to hack a lot together, but since I moved he’s gone rather hog-wild on Sun gear. Thanks to Midwestern house sizes, he has a large-ish closet full of gear that I am very impressed to see. I had to share; the following are his pictures and text.

[caption id=”attachment_1281” align=”alignnone” width=”450” caption=”Main stack, first picture”][/caption]

[caption id=”attachment_1282” align=”alignnone” width=”450” caption=”Main stack, second picture”][/caption]

[caption id=”attachment_1283” align=”alignnone” width=”450” caption=”Other tower 1”][/caption]

[caption id=”attachment_1284” align=”alignnone” width=”450” caption=”Other tower 2”][/caption]

The photography leaves a lot to be desired, but I think you get the idea. The pics labelled tower1a and tower1b are the “main stack,” if you will. Starting from the top down: little black box is cable modem from Comcast. Under that is a sparcstation 5 which is the firewall/router. Under that are two sparcstation LXs. Next, two sparcstation 4s (one of which is my home ftp server), two sparcstation 5s, two sparcstation 10s, two sparcstation 20s, two ultra 5s (of of which is the main fileserver connected to the 711 6 disc external array in the foreground of the second pic), two ultra 1s, and a beastly ultra 2 complete with two 400Mhz processors and a whopping 2G of RAM. Considering when this thing was first on the market, it’s a true godbox! On the floor are two APC smart ups, monitored by the two ultra 5s (and whence by all the others). To the right you’ll see a couple 16 port network switches which may be replaced shortly by one 24 port switch. Under them are two Lightwave ServerSwitches, cascaded together with 8 ports each. Using these, all 16 of the sparcstations/ultras are connected to a single keyboard, mouse and monitor up in the library. And ‘cause they’re Suns (the cool older kind), they can be remotely powered on and off via the keyboard. Cool, eh? :)

Of less interest are the HP laserprinter and a couple generic boxen running Windows 2k pro (for Jodie) and Ubuntu (pour moi). These are connected via kvm extenders to our keyboards, mice and monitors in the library.

The second pair of pics (tower2a and 2b) are of the other tower located in the closet with the furnace, water heater and water softener. From the top down are: sparcstation IPX and IPC, sparcstation 1, sparcstation 2, an LX and a Classic, sparcstation 4, two ultra 5s, a 24 port network switch, another pair of Lightwave ServerSwitches, an Ultra 1, another fully loaded ultra 2, a sparcstation 10, a sparcstation 5, and a sparcstation 20. One of the ultra 5s is a backup for the main fileserver. The sparcstation 5 is connected to the 711 box on the floor and also monitors the APC smartups 1500 you see (it’s the black box on the floor). The IPC and sparcstation 2 netboot via the sparcstation 5. All of these are operated via a keyboard, mouse and monitor in the next room (this is in the basement). The older suns (anything before the classic) can’t be powered on/off via the keyboard. One project is to wire some remote power switches for those.

Waiting in the wings, so to speak are three more IPCs, three more IPXs (one of which is new - never used), a couple classics and LXs, a sparcstation 2, 5, 10, 20 and an ultra 5. Several of them are fully operational and updated with the latest version of OpenBSD. The ultra 5 actually has Solaris 8 loaded. Oh, and guess who just scored a sparcstation 1+ and another ss2 off ebay? :) If you were counting, you’ll have noticed two empty ports on the Lightwaves in the second “tower.” I’ll put the ss1+ there and maybe one of the extra IPXs.

All of the boxes in the towers are fully operational running OpenBSD 4.7. Dmesgs available upon request. Many of them are fully loaded with RAM.

I’ve had some stacks in my time, but damn! Mad props and extreme jealousy, even though my current server probably is faster than all of those combined. ;)