New (used) U60 and a reminder why I don't live in NJ
Feb 20, 2003I bought a Sun Ultra-60 from Anysystem. I plan this box to become a Kerberos/AFS server but it might end up as my primary workstation. I could pull the Znyx quad port card out of the PPro box with OpenBSD that I use as a firewall/router and consolidate other boxes handling nameservice (djbdns), mail (qmail and cucipop) and Apache but it’s just too nice. I picked it up yesterday and they’re a good bunch at that shop. Based on what I’ve seen U60’s selling for, they didn’t make much but were cheery all the same. I’ll do business with them again.
Conveniently, they’re less than 15 miles from my apartment. I used to live in Jersey City and know the roads and traffic patterns, in-bound traffic at 8am was usually lighter than in the evening so I figured that I could drive in, pick up the system and drive back in an hour- maybe an hour and a half if there was traffic- and get to work just a little late.
Yeah. After spending some time watching an idiot who ground their driver’s side against the jersey barrier get flat-bedded away, I get to experience the Peckinpah-esque slow motion silence of traffic as one green and white express bus pushes another off the highway. Fiddling with the radio (the metro New York region has some of the worst stations; even the local NPR sucks when they aren’t carrying the national feed) I settle on the local Infinity broadcasting AM news station in time to get the report that accidents on 80 and 17 are backing up. It takes thirty minutes to cover the next nine miles, working out to a tidy 18MPH. This at least is faster than the average of 7MPH that horses traveled the streets of London circa 1900 so progress was made. I use this handy reference- okay, mantra: This is progress, This is progress- whenever I’m in traffic.