That rail alignment tool is actually very important. You got very lucky that you installed the rails parallel. Sun used sliders with very tight tolerances and if they weren't sufficiently aligned, they would pop apart when loading the server; causing hundreds of ball bearings to fly everywhere and often dropping the server as well.
The reason why the monitor on it is flashing is because, The cold cathode driver for the backlight's capacitors are bad, I had that happen on one of my monitors from the capacitor plague where the screen would strobe, and then one power cycle later they would work.
Yeah, definitely sounds like a CCFL backlight issue. Usually with something this age, the florescent tube is spent, but that shouldn't be the issue with new old stock. Given the periodic "zap" sound it most likely was making, as you said, the driver has probably gone bad due to just sitting for 25 years. Capacitor leakage is a good candidate, especially those surface mounted ones.
@@cfabz2023 Should be an easy fix. It's also not super difficult to retrofit an LED solution, just get some bright white LED tape and install it where the CCFL was, connect it to 12V internally.
With how old that Ethernet cable is, I'd check your switch for what negotiated link speed is and/or swap that cable. Wholly possible that it's gotten brittle being in that coiled orientation in the bag for years and you've got a broken pair or two. I haven't touched Solaris in over 20 years, and have no experience with their thin clients, but the slow painting on the display smells of loads of TCP corrections and/or slow bandwidth.
Ahh yes these are all excellent suggestions. If anything I suspect the cable, given the other Sun Rays (even that Sun Ray 1 of the same era) have been connected to the same Unifi switch without issue. I'll give it some more troubleshooting!
Before gigabit, two pairs were always used. Sure, in theory the pairs could be flakey, but I would think that then it would either not work at all or work decent. Your advice is still worth considering, but I don't think it's that likely.
What makes this so cool, is that Sun was way ahead of its time regarding hotdesking. We are only starting to see widespread use of compute heavy iron in the rack, and distributed resources as necessary.
Previously worked for a large bank with widespread use of virtual desktops and thin clients, smart card auth, desktop follows, etc. Worked as advertised except nobody ever went anywhere and stayed at their own desk. They hadn’t placed units in conference rooms so that feature wasn’t possible. You’d have to find someone with a laptop, send them your deck, and have them come to the meeting. Love the idea, I just don’t think anyone really needs it. “You can save your session in Chicago then go to LA and load it up!”. Great, the 1 person that can use it, the CEO, can but he only wants a laptop and, well, CEO. Not to mention nobody wants to share a keyboard with potentially anyone, every station had to have Clorox wipes and antiseptic gel at them.
hot-desking actually sucks. you're sitting in someone else's germs, and usually leads to being treated like a gang of workers instead of a valued employee. Not having your own space at the company makes them feel less valued. We're not only starting to see heavy iron, it's been made obsolete because PC components have gotten cheaper. There is only one company left, IBM, that runs mainframes and they do NOT use them for hot desking.
Your retro rack is shaping up nicely, I was a solaris admin in the late 90's / early 00's and our racks looked very similar with a mix of Cisco gear, Sun, and IBM servers. We had a bunch of pizza box sun's on shelves that were running stuff like DNS still mixed with the newer rack mounted gear.
I want to say THANK YOU to all the generous viewers who give Caleb this stuff, its like donating to a museum because we all get to appreciate it, and Caleb makes it work, and you're doing something awesome by giving us all that benefit. Goes way beyond giving one guy some free swag. Thanks everyone
Thanks for sharing that project. I used to work a bit on these machines in late 2000s. When we hit a load cap on our faithful SunFire V880 (abt. 250-300 concurrent users daily), we made custom scripts that ran the users' KDE sessions over SSH on Linux machines farm (running Gentoo). I still have a Sun card. I miss those times!
what a perfect condition those came in, you should take all of your sun thin clients and set up a mock office space, something we would've seen back when these were new. Great video, clab.
I was a Solaris admin in the 00s, and much prefer Sol 8 to the newer versions - it's more like the traditional unixes, with cfg files, unlike the later versions where they introduced all the *adm commands you have to learn. Go for Solaris 8 for the older Rays! The things you need to know for 8 is the # touch /reconfigure; init 6 (make it set up drivers for new hw) and # ifconfig plumb 😋
11:36 Looks like the mouse cable was designed to colour match with the keyboard itself, I guess since its original intent was to go into the keyboard, pretty neat honestly!
The Sun logo is absolutely gorgeous and you’re not wrong for loving a machine for the logo. I bought a Sun Blade 1000 because the Sun logo is the power light. So, I get it 😬
In the 90s we had all HP and DEC in the 3M factory I worked at. No Sun. However, if you want to see rows and rows of them see if you can find the "Star Wars" exhibit. It was recently at the Reagan Museum in Simi Valley, CA. In the Reagan times, there were whole rooms filled win Sun systems of every type!
I was always wanting to have such kind of well-chartered workstations that come with a smart card, print manuals, and others I need. I hope that I could have one to fill the absense in the future!
8:50 This is why I always choose non-shrinkwrapped items when going for collectors items. The savings from sellers thinking it's less valuable is just a bonus.
Man, I was about to ask if you had tried "clabbing it in the face" when the monitor wouldn't work. A minute further in you had just done that. I'm glad I could help ;-) What a gem you have found! And thanks for sharing, I'm half way into the video... Cheers!
Did my Computer Science degree on one of those badboys. It was honestly quite refreshing back then to background off a task, leave it and come back to it.
Nice machine! I would strongly recommend looking into recapping it before using it further, as bad caps can in some cases cause excessive load on the semiconductors, which in turn might fail even though there weren't any fault with them initially. Since the fault is in the monitor, you can probably unplug an internal power connection to the monitor part to allow you tinkering with the machine until you get around to recapping it. Btw VGA IS RGB, just a specific subset of RGB, i.e. 31.5kHz or higher horizontal sync frequency, usually at least 56Hz vertical sync frequency, and horizontal + vertical sync on separate pins with TTL signal levels. The actual analogue RGB signals are the same among most systems. In fact with the right software (IIRC Powerstrip in Windows) you can reprogram a VGA card to use standard definition TV sync frequencies and connect the VGA RGB output to a regular TV (with RGB input, or with just a RGB to composite/S-video/Component signal type converter). It's likely that any VGA monitor will work directly without the OSSC, as the output were intended to connect to a projector that in turn would be intended to be connected to a PC with VGA output. There is a slight chance/risk that there were some settings to configure it for sync on green or not, and things like that, but still. Sun for sure didn't make any SUN branded projectors, and I have never heard of any projector specifically intended for use with work stations and not PCs. (Back before VGA became common the inputs on projectors varied though . for example some old Barco model did CGA digital RGB, analogue RGB for other signal sources, and composite. (Barco was one of the larger projector manufacturers over here in Europe).
Omg the amount of fun we could have with that kind of gear together haha. I'll move into your basement lol. Love your videos! I want to do a simular setup myself but don't have the space at all to do it sadly.
Very very cool! I, too, love Sun equipment! In fact, I use a Sun keyboard on one of my workstations at work. My coworkers think I'm nuts to use it! LOL
To complete your Sun journey, looks for the Sun Optical mouse and the matching mouse pad. Way ahead of its time and not like other optical mice we use today. Man I miss my Sun gear!
Dell rails, if you're reasonably skilled, you can install one handed in the rack since they lock into the square holes. There are no actual rails on the server, just pins that sit in the rails when you lower it down and they lock into place. It's always nice to have a helper when installing Dell servers, but you can certainly do it yourself if you have to.
At one of the last JavaOne conferences I attended, they had hundreds of them set up around the Moscone Center. You could plug in your ID badge, which was a smart card, and start using them. Your session followed you no matter which one you used. It would even pause a video midstream and resume playing it once you put you card in another machine.
Seeing you having TWO Sun keyboards is just teasing me. I have an old Sun Ultra 5 I rescued from a server dump and it came without monitor, keyboard or mouse (but with a lot of dust). And those don't start graphics if they don't detected a keyboard connected! I made a USB to Sun Type 5 keyboard and mouse protocol converted with a microcontroller because I can't find anything sun where I live. Also that IPX IS SO CUTE! I want one...
The idea of the "hotdesking" - having a smartcard that you just plug into the computer terminal and have your session work as a network KVM fascinates and intrigues me. I've wanted (futilely) to be able to just use my beefy desktop tower over my home LAN from a laptop, in a way that means I don't have to worry about what machine I was doing stuff on. It's impressive to see a 10/100 network connection do the LAN-KVM stuff, my intuition leant to it being hard to push lots of video at low latency across a LAN even with 1Gbit ethernet. I do hope to see more in-depth stuff on the particulars of the smartcards (CCID/PCSC, interfaces,the varied types of cards, and programming them to actually do something useful) as well as more about "hotdesking" LAN-KVM stuff.
Firmware for the clients was included up until srss 5.2 you could either down grade to that version or export the firmware out of it and add to your v5.4 repository. Ive had good luck using modern credit/debit cards as well as a target card for getting my sunrays working.
When I was in college, I tried to launch SoftPC on an Ultra Sparc 1. I was attempting Windows 3.1 in SoftPC. That triggered a kernel panic in Solaris 2.5. That system was also the undergrad file server. It took about 30 minutes to run fsck! Thankfully it was at 2 AM on a Saturday night. I also frequently used WABI. Now that was a hot mess!
I worked with these Sun Rays on a project, we were partnered with Sun to develop some uses for them. I worked with integration with the Sun servers and HP machines, using the Suns as session servers. The cards were interesting for security reasons for us, two-factor authentication as well as being able to take your session with you. I worked with the cards some, there are a couple of kinds of smart cars and the Sun Rays are picky about the versions of the standards. I recall there were two major standards. These were quite interesting little things. I don't know why they are so slow for you, they were reasonably fast (enough) for us. You have to initialize the cards, I never worked with that part so I don't know the exact procedure. I still have a couple of those mouse mats around, but I don't know if I have any cards. If I ever come across one of my old cards I'll send it to you. These never got as popular as they should have, they had a lot of interesting use cases.
Interesting, and thank you! I suspect the slowness is simply the firmware being so far out of date or the network not running at full 100Mbit (which could also be due to the firmware)
What a great video!! It’s always exciting to see your awesome Sun equipment especially the Sun Raeeeee!!! Oh that poor thing does look like a bad capacitor issue 😢 or perhaps something mechanical has gone wrong maybe a loose connection or a backlight problem 😅
SunOS was originally a BSD flavour of Unix, Solaris is an AT&T SysV flavour. At least for part of the SunOS life. I forget the version when it all changed.
I think I just realized why I like this channel so much. This dude is the Steve1979MRE of the enterprise computing world. Turns on a server, fan comes on: “Nice hiss …”
Just seeing that mouse mat brought back memories. And yeah, the type 6 should've had a usb port to 'daisy chain' the mouse via the keyboard. At least all the ones I saw in the early 2000's were, tho I didn't have any 150s. Just used sunray 2, and get a keyboard kit as an extra.
I have a Sun type 5c and a type 6 (non usb) and I of course had to go press the keys right when you brought yours out and thought "you know what, he's right"
For the record, Sun was selling "PC servers" way back. Starting with the Sunfire v20z/v40z (2/4 opterons.) They're rebadged systems made by Newisys. (I have a bunch of them if you want a few. Shipping is $$$ because they weigh 35lbs each.)
@@clabretroIt was pretty good. There was an issue with RGB / RBG differences between Solaris and RedHat. From vague memory they sent us a patched binary to sort it out. People had very few issues. Could even watch YT videos. This was 2010. Servers were Sun Blades. I think (?) original Opteron series CPUs. Running 50 or 60 sessions per server. Fun times.
The Type 6 keyboard was available as proprietary or USB. The proprietary (it's TTL 5v inverted logic serial) version has the mouse port like your Type 5c.
6:14 I love opening new old stock like that. I have always wanted a Sun system of some sort. I was the IT guy that was always scrounging around in the recycle bin of our enterprise class computer junk. I had a bunch of Novell stuff but never managed to score anything from Sun. I the late '90s I was using Linux as I thought Microsoft was evil and wanted to find something else non-Microsoft and Sun seemed like a logical choice but it was so expensive at the time to buy.
5:10 - on the "definitely ask for stories", I've gotten _great_ info on some of my local Craigslist pick-ups. An original Macintosh 128k with a _1983_ serial number, from a college professor who bought it day one and daily used it (after an Apple-official 512k upgrade) through 2001 to write papers! I bought it from him in 2008ish, and it came with many day-one accessories. Still works great. A second-generation (256kB RAM) IBM PC 5150 from its original owner - the former CEO of a company that wrote APL-language compilers. The MDA graphics card had a custom video ROM chip that allows it to show APL-custom characters. Plus the original ROM chip supplied. Again, still works great. A couple SGI rack-mount servers that had belonged to Weta Digital, and were used in the compute cluster to render The Lord of the Rings movies. (Sadly, no hard drives provided. But one still has its Weta Digital asset tag sticker. I have no idea how these made it over to the USA.) A bunch of "early multimedia PC" equipment, including a hand-made Creative Labs Sound Blaster early prototype. (Called "Killer Card" at the time.)
Make sure your network connection is working at full 100 speed. My school had a bunch of these and they'd go into "slow mo" if the network cables were damaged.
@@WesleyBryie It was just like using any other computer at the time, honestly. Each student had a java card and you slotted it into any of the systems in the school to reach your desktop, which was just always going. The desktop was a little laggy, but overall it worked great. More than enough for typing, web browsing, and programming. It was cool because you could leave applications running and just forget about them, they'd be there next time you slid your card in, even if it had been days. You stored your files on your network share, you could turn work in by dropping it in the teacher's drop-box on the network, it was kind of magic. I'm kind of sad the world didn't embrace that kind of experience, because when it worked it was magic. Of course, when it didn't work literally nobody on campus could use any computers, which was less magical. It was also a bit of a hassle to get files to and from your network share if you had a personal laptop/computer, but flash drives worked in the client's usb ports. File copy to and from them was SLOW though.
I'm guessing the LCD is actually working, it's the CFL power supply that's failing... Most likely a separate module that would be easy enough to replace. Pretty common for something this old to have a failing backlight, though usually it's the other way around where the CFL tube dies. lol
I wonder how much these were actually used? Hotdesking really seems like a no brainer for places like schools, not so much really for places like offices.
(7:44) I seem to recall that was for a proprietary Sun keyboard and mouse interface. (10:57) I'm guessing that with the Type 6 keyboard, there were likely different versions made that used either the Sun proprietary keyboard and mouse interface or USB. (29:53) As far as I know, that's the GNOME splash screen that early versions of GNOME 2.x had, but modified for Java Desktop System, which if I recall correctly, was basically Sun's fork of GNOME that was only ever shipped in Solaris 10.
i used to repair lcd monitors back in high school and some of them had florescent lights so after you waited for them to warm up they would "just work". that might be the case.. dont get zapped by the caps if you try to fix it though they hold charge for well over a week
One advantage I see on the Type 6 keyboard over the type 5: the Backspace key is in the now-standard position, top left corner of the main section of the keyboard. On the Type 5, I see it’s one row lower, on the top row of letters instead of the number row.
the type 5 is "Unix Layout", Sun made the Type 6 in Unix Layout as well as the Type 7. So many layouts between the pc and unix layout and different languages.
Such a funny thing to see the smack work lol. My sunray 1g stays on orange for a bit, before booting up about 20-30 minutes later. But it stays up consistently after it's "warm up"
Ahh Server Rails. Kinda remind me of Cisco UCS servers that I put in during my internship (similar railing system), and I kinda miss my Datacenter intern job now 😂 also great to see that the sun rail's ball bearings are good!
18:18 This might actually be a common thing for Sun monitors - or, speaking more generally, monitors produced in that time. It might be the screen’s backlight that‘s causing this behaviour. I still have two Sun 27“ monitors sitting around (didn’t use them in ages, though) and one of them has very similar symptoms. Sometimes it even needs multiple slaps / power cycles but eventually it‘ll work. I‘m no electrical engineer, either, so I never bothered to find out what’s actually happening 😂
Solaris/CDE on Sun Rays was peak computing, we will never have anything this perfect again
That rail alignment tool is actually very important. You got very lucky that you installed the rails parallel. Sun used sliders with very tight tolerances and if they weren't sufficiently aligned, they would pop apart when loading the server; causing hundreds of ball bearings to fly everywhere and often dropping the server as well.
The reason why the monitor on it is flashing is because, The cold cathode driver for the backlight's capacitors are bad, I had that happen on one of my monitors from the capacitor plague where the screen would strobe, and then one power cycle later they would work.
Yeah, definitely sounds like a CCFL backlight issue. Usually with something this age, the florescent tube is spent, but that shouldn't be the issue with new old stock. Given the periodic "zap" sound it most likely was making, as you said, the driver has probably gone bad due to just sitting for 25 years. Capacitor leakage is a good candidate, especially those surface mounted ones.
@@cfabz2023 Should be an easy fix. It's also not super difficult to retrofit an LED solution, just get some bright white LED tape and install it where the CCFL was, connect it to 12V internally.
Yep. It's _always_ the caps.
With how old that Ethernet cable is, I'd check your switch for what negotiated link speed is and/or swap that cable. Wholly possible that it's gotten brittle being in that coiled orientation in the bag for years and you've got a broken pair or two. I haven't touched Solaris in over 20 years, and have no experience with their thin clients, but the slow painting on the display smells of loads of TCP corrections and/or slow bandwidth.
Depending on the switch, I used to have speed/duplex detection issues with some Sun equipment. Maybe check that?
Collision can be a factor on some really primitive Ethernet implementations.
Ahh yes these are all excellent suggestions. If anything I suspect the cable, given the other Sun Rays (even that Sun Ray 1 of the same era) have been connected to the same Unifi switch without issue. I'll give it some more troubleshooting!
Before gigabit, two pairs were always used. Sure, in theory the pairs could be flakey, but I would think that then it would either not work at all or work decent. Your advice is still worth considering, but I don't think it's that likely.
My suggestion is to disable autonegotiation and force full duplex if that is 100 Mb/s.
Finally something that wasn't broken in shipping!
Aaaand of course it has problems anyway. 😄
haha
What makes this so cool, is that Sun was way ahead of its time regarding hotdesking. We are only starting to see widespread use of compute heavy iron in the rack, and distributed resources as necessary.
Previously worked for a large bank with widespread use of virtual desktops and thin clients, smart card auth, desktop follows, etc. Worked as advertised except nobody ever went anywhere and stayed at their own desk. They hadn’t placed units in conference rooms so that feature wasn’t possible. You’d have to find someone with a laptop, send them your deck, and have them come to the meeting. Love the idea, I just don’t think anyone really needs it.
“You can save your session in Chicago then go to LA and load it up!”. Great, the 1 person that can use it, the CEO, can but he only wants a laptop and, well, CEO.
Not to mention nobody wants to share a keyboard with potentially anyone, every station had to have Clorox wipes and antiseptic gel at them.
hot-desking actually sucks. you're sitting in someone else's germs, and usually leads to being treated like a gang of workers instead of a valued employee. Not having your own space at the company makes them feel less valued. We're not only starting to see heavy iron, it's been made obsolete because PC components have gotten cheaper. There is only one company left, IBM, that runs mainframes and they do NOT use them for hot desking.
Terminals and mainframes have been a thing since decades though. It's just another iteration?
Ah, the perfect Saturday morning vid. Cheers.
Sunday would be even better when you really think about it.
@ 😂 Fair point.
I can’t wait to see that rack full of old servers, Sun purple and SGI purple is gonna look amazing
Your retro rack is shaping up nicely, I was a solaris admin in the late 90's / early 00's and our racks looked very similar with a mix of Cisco gear, Sun, and IBM servers. We had a bunch of pizza box sun's on shelves that were running stuff like DNS still mixed with the newer rack mounted gear.
ah awesome!
I want to say THANK YOU to all the generous viewers who give Caleb this stuff, its like donating to a museum because we all get to appreciate it, and Caleb makes it work, and you're doing something awesome by giving us all that benefit. Goes way beyond giving one guy some free swag. Thanks everyone
Banging the CRT on the side to bring it back to life just unlocked a core memory of me doing this often in my computer lab in school in the 90s!
Yes - a time-honored troubleshooting technique that wasn't -- but should've been -- in the manual.
Dude I am loving these Sun videos! So glad someone is posting Sun content!!
Your Sun Ray series is top notch mate, thank you for everything you do, record, and explain! ❤
thank you!
Thanks for sharing that project. I used to work a bit on these machines in late 2000s. When we hit a load cap on our faithful SunFire V880 (abt. 250-300 concurrent users daily), we made custom scripts that ran the users' KDE sessions over SSH on Linux machines farm (running Gentoo). I still have a Sun card. I miss those times!
“The mark of the beast” hahaha always fun to make fun of Oracle. Great video as always
what a perfect condition those came in, you should take all of your sun thin clients and set up a mock office space, something we would've seen back when these were new. Great video, clab.
Coincidental Foreshadowing - great name for a band :)
I am fascinated by the sun thin client stuff. Thanks clabretro you are the highlight of my subscription feed awesome video!!
I used to build those computers at Celestica in Irvine. I was one of their testers..
oh that's awesome!
Love the look of that Sun Ray 150
the sun is out, got a fresh cup of java, time to watch the new clabretro video 😁
Used to us a Sun Ray 150 when I worked in Edinburgh 2008/9 to change charge tapes in these massive tape juke boxes
I was a Solaris admin in the 00s, and much prefer Sol 8 to the newer versions - it's more like the traditional unixes, with cfg files, unlike the later versions where they introduced all the *adm commands you have to learn. Go for Solaris 8 for the older Rays! The things you need to know for 8 is the # touch /reconfigure; init 6 (make it set up drivers for new hw) and # ifconfig plumb 😋
11:36 Looks like the mouse cable was designed to colour match with the keyboard itself, I guess since its original intent was to go into the keyboard, pretty neat honestly!
ah you're right!
I love all of these videos series because you are slowly but surely making me relive all of my it experience from elementary to high school
I really like these Sun Ray videos, I could watch them all day!!
Time for my Saturday morning coffee and clabretro.
The Sun logo is absolutely gorgeous and you’re not wrong for loving a machine for the logo. I bought a Sun Blade 1000 because the Sun logo is the power light. So, I get it 😬
Type 5 vs. type 6 was a battle. I remember we had CAD engineers refusing to switch to Blade 1000s as they shipped with type 6.
In the 90s we had all HP and DEC in the 3M factory I worked at. No Sun. However, if you want to see rows and rows of them see if you can find the "Star Wars" exhibit. It was recently at the Reagan Museum in Simi Valley, CA. In the Reagan times, there were whole rooms filled win Sun systems of every type!
The Network is the Computer is more true today than it was back then.
Thanks for the rails demo. That was helpful.
I used to have one of these at my desk for managing the company's Nortel Shasta infrastructure.
i m a sucker for unboxining new old stock...that sun is nice! love the retro rack...cant wait to see more clab ....great job!
Years ago I received a dvd of Sun Solaris and later Open Solaris from SUN. Did not even ask for it. Very cool to play around with it.
Nice nostalgia of a very short span of Sun’s near end of lifespan. Things weren’t far from the end once they hit peak client/server.
More Sun Ray content, yey!
I was always wanting to have such kind of well-chartered workstations that come with a smart card, print manuals, and others I need. I hope that I could have one to fill the absense in the future!
8:50 This is why I always choose non-shrinkwrapped items when going for collectors items. The savings from sellers thinking it's less valuable is just a bonus.
Man, I was about to ask if you had tried "clabbing it in the face" when the monitor wouldn't work. A minute further in you had just done that. I'm glad I could help ;-) What a gem you have found! And thanks for sharing, I'm half way into the video... Cheers!
Did my Computer Science degree on one of those badboys. It was honestly quite refreshing back then to background off a task, leave it and come back to it.
Nice machine!
I would strongly recommend looking into recapping it before using it further, as bad caps can in some cases cause excessive load on the semiconductors, which in turn might fail even though there weren't any fault with them initially.
Since the fault is in the monitor, you can probably unplug an internal power connection to the monitor part to allow you tinkering with the machine until you get around to recapping it.
Btw VGA IS RGB, just a specific subset of RGB, i.e. 31.5kHz or higher horizontal sync frequency, usually at least 56Hz vertical sync frequency, and horizontal + vertical sync on separate pins with TTL signal levels. The actual analogue RGB signals are the same among most systems. In fact with the right software (IIRC Powerstrip in Windows) you can reprogram a VGA card to use standard definition TV sync frequencies and connect the VGA RGB output to a regular TV (with RGB input, or with just a RGB to composite/S-video/Component signal type converter).
It's likely that any VGA monitor will work directly without the OSSC, as the output were intended to connect to a projector that in turn would be intended to be connected to a PC with VGA output. There is a slight chance/risk that there were some settings to configure it for sync on green or not, and things like that, but still. Sun for sure didn't make any SUN branded projectors, and I have never heard of any projector specifically intended for use with work stations and not PCs. (Back before VGA became common the inputs on projectors varied though . for example some old Barco model did CGA digital RGB, analogue RGB for other signal sources, and composite. (Barco was one of the larger projector manufacturers over here in Europe).
This was cool! I've never seen or touched any Sun/Solaris stuff irl so whole new world for me!
Omg the amount of fun we could have with that kind of gear together haha. I'll move into your basement lol.
Love your videos! I want to do a simular setup myself but don't have the space at all to do it sadly.
the perfect video for lunch
Very very cool! I, too, love Sun equipment! In fact, I use a Sun keyboard on one of my workstations at work. My coworkers think I'm nuts to use it! LOL
woah, we had those at my elementary school computer lab. I had a friend who's dad worked for Sun until the company went under.
To complete your Sun journey, looks for the Sun Optical mouse and the matching mouse pad. Way ahead of its time and not like other optical mice we use today. Man I miss my Sun gear!
Your videos are very interesting.You've got the gift.
Dell rails, if you're reasonably skilled, you can install one handed in the rack since they lock into the square holes. There are no actual rails on the server, just pins that sit in the rails when you lower it down and they lock into place. It's always nice to have a helper when installing Dell servers, but you can certainly do it yourself if you have to.
This is super cool, it might be fun to make a modern version of this idea.
At one of the last JavaOne conferences I attended, they had hundreds of them set up around the Moscone Center. You could plug in your ID badge, which was a smart card, and start using them. Your session followed you no matter which one you used. It would even pause a video midstream and resume playing it once you put you card in another machine.
Seeing you having TWO Sun keyboards is just teasing me. I have an old Sun Ultra 5 I rescued from a server dump and it came without monitor, keyboard or mouse (but with a lot of dust). And those don't start graphics if they don't detected a keyboard connected! I made a USB to Sun Type 5 keyboard and mouse protocol converted with a microcontroller because I can't find anything sun where I live.
Also that IPX IS SO CUTE! I want one...
Percussive maintenance!
The idea of the "hotdesking" - having a smartcard that you just plug into the computer terminal and have your session work as a network KVM fascinates and intrigues me.
I've wanted (futilely) to be able to just use my beefy desktop tower over my home LAN from a laptop, in a way that means I don't have to worry about what machine I was doing stuff on.
It's impressive to see a 10/100 network connection do the LAN-KVM stuff, my intuition leant to it being hard to push lots of video at low latency across a LAN even with 1Gbit ethernet.
I do hope to see more in-depth stuff on the particulars of the smartcards (CCID/PCSC, interfaces,the varied types of cards, and programming them to actually do something useful) as well as more about "hotdesking" LAN-KVM stuff.
9:26 As Korean, I like that the page you randomly opened is in Korean 😄
Firmware for the clients was included up until srss 5.2 you could either down grade to that version or export the firmware out of it and add to your v5.4 repository. Ive had good luck using modern credit/debit cards as well as a target card for getting my sunrays working.
When I was in college, I tried to launch SoftPC on an Ultra Sparc 1. I was attempting Windows 3.1 in SoftPC.
That triggered a kernel panic in Solaris 2.5. That system was also the undergrad file server. It took about 30 minutes to run fsck!
Thankfully it was at 2 AM on a Saturday night.
I also frequently used WABI. Now that was a hot mess!
I worked with these Sun Rays on a project, we were partnered with Sun to develop some uses for them. I worked with integration with the Sun servers and HP machines, using the Suns as session servers. The cards were interesting for security reasons for us, two-factor authentication as well as being able to take your session with you. I worked with the cards some, there are a couple of kinds of smart cars and the Sun Rays are picky about the versions of the standards. I recall there were two major standards. These were quite interesting little things. I don't know why they are so slow for you, they were reasonably fast (enough) for us. You have to initialize the cards, I never worked with that part so I don't know the exact procedure. I still have a couple of those mouse mats around, but I don't know if I have any cards. If I ever come across one of my old cards I'll send it to you. These never got as popular as they should have, they had a lot of interesting use cases.
Interesting, and thank you! I suspect the slowness is simply the firmware being so far out of date or the network not running at full 100Mbit (which could also be due to the firmware)
What a great video!! It’s always exciting to see your awesome Sun equipment especially the Sun Raeeeee!!! Oh that poor thing does look like a bad capacitor issue 😢 or perhaps something mechanical has gone wrong maybe a loose connection or a backlight problem 😅
Percussive maintenance never fails lol.
Another great video 🙂
I set up a bunch of Sun Ray 1's back in the day, we were on Solaris 8 and I think server version 1.2.
Thanks for another great SUN video 😁
SunOS was originally a BSD flavour of Unix, Solaris is an AT&T SysV flavour. At least for part of the SunOS life. I forget the version when it all changed.
I think SunOS 4.1.1 was the last BSD bases. Solaris 2/SunOS 5 was the first SysV
I looked it up and Solaris 1.0 was released with SunOS 4.1.1B so it's a lot older than I thought.
What I DIDN’T expect to see was the combat knife for both unboxing…
I used something like these at university. I remember running ProEngineer 3D CAD system on these things.
Hell yeah, Sun Ray ftw
I think I just realized why I like this channel so much. This dude is the Steve1979MRE of the enterprise computing world.
Turns on a server, fan comes on: “Nice hiss …”
this is high praise
pulling out the mousepad had me so jealous!
I think the problem on the Sunray 150 might be a cracked or broken solder joint due to the fact that a smack “fixes” it. Great video
Ah good call! Quite possibly
Just seeing that mouse mat brought back memories.
And yeah, the type 6 should've had a usb port to 'daisy chain' the mouse via the keyboard. At least all the ones I saw in the early 2000's were, tho I didn't have any 150s. Just used sunray 2, and get a keyboard kit as an extra.
I used that same mouse pad for about 10 years, but its was on a Linux/x86 machine.
does it need to update drivers from repo?)
I have a Sun type 5c and a type 6 (non usb) and I of course had to go press the keys right when you brought yours out and thought "you know what, he's right"
Haha
For the record, Sun was selling "PC servers" way back. Starting with the Sunfire v20z/v40z (2/4 opterons.) They're rebadged systems made by Newisys. (I have a bunch of them if you want a few. Shipping is $$$ because they weigh 35lbs each.)
Used to run these (SunRay 2) on RHEL for about 300 people.
how was it?
@@clabretroIt was pretty good. There was an issue with RGB / RBG differences between Solaris and RedHat. From vague memory they sent us a patched binary to sort it out.
People had very few issues. Could even watch YT videos. This was 2010. Servers were Sun Blades. I think (?) original Opteron series CPUs. Running 50 or 60 sessions per server. Fun times.
The Type 6 keyboard was available as proprietary or USB. The proprietary (it's TTL 5v inverted logic serial) version has the mouse port like your Type 5c.
6:14 I love opening new old stock like that. I have always wanted a Sun system of some sort. I was the IT guy that was always scrounging around in the recycle bin of our enterprise class computer junk. I had a bunch of Novell stuff but never managed to score anything from Sun. I the late '90s I was using Linux as I thought Microsoft was evil and wanted to find something else non-Microsoft and Sun seemed like a logical choice but it was so expensive at the time to buy.
A little love tap never hurt no one. Hell I beat the bricks off my daily PC so it stays in check.
how many bricks that pc got ???
5:10 - on the "definitely ask for stories", I've gotten _great_ info on some of my local Craigslist pick-ups.
An original Macintosh 128k with a _1983_ serial number, from a college professor who bought it day one and daily used it (after an Apple-official 512k upgrade) through 2001 to write papers! I bought it from him in 2008ish, and it came with many day-one accessories. Still works great.
A second-generation (256kB RAM) IBM PC 5150 from its original owner - the former CEO of a company that wrote APL-language compilers. The MDA graphics card had a custom video ROM chip that allows it to show APL-custom characters. Plus the original ROM chip supplied. Again, still works great.
A couple SGI rack-mount servers that had belonged to Weta Digital, and were used in the compute cluster to render The Lord of the Rings movies. (Sadly, no hard drives provided. But one still has its Weta Digital asset tag sticker. I have no idea how these made it over to the USA.)
A bunch of "early multimedia PC" equipment, including a hand-made Creative Labs Sound Blaster early prototype. (Called "Killer Card" at the time.)
awesome! yeah it pays off to ask, it's always more interesting than expected
Yee, nice content for good food!!
Thank you for this video!
Make sure your network connection is working at full 100 speed. My school had a bunch of these and they'd go into "slow mo" if the network cables were damaged.
good call! I'll double check that
What was the experience like? I'm used to not using remote servers for workstations at my schools
100% thought same thing. make sure it didn't negotiate down to 10Mb, or switch port config wrong.
@@WesleyBryie It was just like using any other computer at the time, honestly. Each student had a java card and you slotted it into any of the systems in the school to reach your desktop, which was just always going. The desktop was a little laggy, but overall it worked great. More than enough for typing, web browsing, and programming. It was cool because you could leave applications running and just forget about them, they'd be there next time you slid your card in, even if it had been days. You stored your files on your network share, you could turn work in by dropping it in the teacher's drop-box on the network, it was kind of magic. I'm kind of sad the world didn't embrace that kind of experience, because when it worked it was magic. Of course, when it didn't work literally nobody on campus could use any computers, which was less magical. It was also a bit of a hassle to get files to and from your network share if you had a personal laptop/computer, but flash drives worked in the client's usb ports. File copy to and from them was SLOW though.
I'm guessing the LCD is actually working, it's the CFL power supply that's failing... Most likely a separate module that would be easy enough to replace. Pretty common for something this old to have a failing backlight, though usually it's the other way around where the CFL tube dies. lol
Your digression to the Ramsey cold case was unexpected and kind of funny in a morbid way
I did *not* expect that, I know that much.
Livermore, Ca checking in. I don't recall Access Graphics. Possibly sold equipment to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
I always liked these
What’s your electricity bill like? My homelab uses a lot and I don’t have a lot running.
Don't know off the top of my head but the old stuff never runs 24/7. Those Dell servers on the other hand...
monitor definitely sounds like it needs a re-cap, but it can't hurt to check for cold solder joints
Jonbenet Ramsey was a case that popped up around the international news circuit, including nz/aus.
I wonder how much these were actually used? Hotdesking really seems like a no brainer for places like schools, not so much really for places like offices.
18:22 time and time history proves that slapping the screen should be the first step of troubleshooting
24:21 - screw sack. I am going to use that to describe someone. I like that.
(7:44) I seem to recall that was for a proprietary Sun keyboard and mouse interface.
(10:57) I'm guessing that with the Type 6 keyboard, there were likely different versions made that used either the Sun proprietary keyboard and mouse interface or USB.
(29:53) As far as I know, that's the GNOME splash screen that early versions of GNOME 2.x had, but modified for Java Desktop System, which if I recall correctly, was basically Sun's fork of GNOME that was only ever shipped in Solaris 10.
Hey now, nothing wrong with a little percussive maintenance. Sometimes you gotta show these machines who’s the boss. 😂
i used to repair lcd monitors back in high school and some of them had florescent lights so after you waited for them to warm up they would "just work". that might be the case.. dont get zapped by the caps if you try to fix it though they hold charge for well over a week
One advantage I see on the Type 6 keyboard over the type 5: the Backspace key is in the now-standard position, top left corner of the main section of the keyboard. On the Type 5, I see it’s one row lower, on the top row of letters instead of the number row.
True!
the type 5 is "Unix Layout", Sun made the Type 6 in Unix Layout as well as the Type 7. So many layouts between the pc and unix layout and different languages.
I absolutely love thin clients. "Why is my computer so slow? Because you're halfway across the planet and your best latency is 250 ms."
Great to see a video on this! Saw this on Instagram, I was like.... Hmmm. 😂
Such a funny thing to see the smack work lol. My sunray 1g stays on orange for a bit, before booting up about 20-30 minutes later. But it stays up consistently after it's "warm up"
Ahh Server Rails. Kinda remind me of Cisco UCS servers that I put in during my internship (similar railing system), and I kinda miss my Datacenter intern job now 😂 also great to see that the sun rail's ball bearings are good!
5 mins lets go bruh the poor sun ray lagging so bad
18:18 This might actually be a common thing for Sun monitors - or, speaking more generally, monitors produced in that time. It might be the screen’s backlight that‘s causing this behaviour. I still have two Sun 27“ monitors sitting around (didn’t use them in ages, though) and one of them has very similar symptoms. Sometimes it even needs multiple slaps / power cycles but eventually it‘ll work. I‘m no electrical engineer, either, so I never bothered to find out what’s actually happening 😂