I got to have this kind of fun a few years ago, when a company in our building threw away a Sun Ultra 45, which I believe was the last of the SPARC boxes packaged into a desktop form factor. These things were the stuff of legend - we had the later x86 Sun's in college - and I quite nearly blew a fuse after my coworker sent a photo of it in a dumpster, without telling me where it was until 30 minutes later.

By this point, Sun hardware was mostly PC-like: it took SATA hard drives, DDR memory, and USB peripherals. You didn't need to issue STOP to get to the `ok` prompt, you just had to do some specifically-timed dance with the (soft) power button.

My guess, based on the company throwing it out, is that they hit the power button, got a blinking red light with no video output, assumed it was dead, and tossed it. At this point, I didn't even know yet that there was an `ok` prompt to get to, and I spent a few hours at the office that night, wrapping my head around the service manual before getting it to dump me to `ok` and let me poke around.

I dreamt for years of restoring it and using it as a NAS (ZFS!), but life got in the way, and I eventually sold it (sufficiently refurbed to be running Solaris 10, but missing things like the side panels and drive cage) for only $250 or so.

I remember me and another guy at work bringing home a Solaris CD and trying to install it on our commodity hardware (we were both enamored by Unix and wanted to have access to it at home for programming and tinkering). As expected (not by us then though), it didn't install. Around the same time, magazines started including Linux CDs and I was able to get one of those going. But the credit for lighting the sparc still goes to Sun.

> 6-byte ethernet address (first three bytes should be 80:00:20).

I believe the first three bytes should be 08:00:20, since "08:00:20" is currently assigned to Oracle (who bought Sun in 2010), and "80:00:20" appears to be unassigned.

This is also visible in the photo just below "Sun SPARCstation 20", where it says:

    Ethernet address 8:0:20:c0:ff:ee, Host ID: 72c0ffee.

Despite the completely different architecture, it's interesting to note the similarities with a standard PC; I'm sure many others here have seen "CMOS checksum error" messages from the latter before. On the other hand, the most surprising difference is that the MAC address appears to be stored there too, along with other data like manufacturing date that I wouldn't expect to be in anything but a ROM or perhaps E(E)PROM.

I have a couple sun servers on my basement ... The fully-loaded Sun E450 will dim the lights when it's booted!

Good old sparc. I wonder how many other engineers brought down production by closing their laptop lid in the datacenter while connected to the console port (which drops the server to ok) on the db server.

Unplug first!

> /etc/ethers

Since this uses NSS you're "supposed" to use `getent ethers` to read the file. But since there's no enumeration ...

To be pedantic, none of those machines are “servers”; they are all desktop machines.

had a lot of fun as a kid trying to figure out a working ram pair pattern among 16 RAM sticks to get a Sparc 2 "pizza box" to boot. After a couple of days, she booted! Rewarding.