Sometimes even free is too much
Mar 13, 2004
I scavenged a cast-off Sun Ultra5 with a fried on-board video from work last month. After correcting a misconfigured mainboard (I guess no one ever used the serial ports) and plugging in a Znyx quad-port card I had from an earlier firewall, I loaded up OpenBSD and burned it in for a month. Last night I ran several hours of firmware diags. No problems. Today I went to slot it into place as a replacement for an Ultra1 doing duty as a firewall and mailhost and discovered that the U5 won’t halt and restart cleanly and that while the quad card initializes, it won’t detect carrier. Spent all morning troubleshooting only to prove that the quad card works in my U60 and the U5 is wonky. Obviously, this box isn’t going to work as a replacement firewall. Maybe I’ll pick up a stripped U5 or U10 off ebay and swap in the CPU and RAM. Frustrating.