On My New Sun Netra X1

Sat, June 14, 2008 - 10:36 AM PST

I don't troll eBay like I used to - and since the great purge, I've had a strict policy of not collecting cruft. But when I saw an auction for a teeny-tiny 1U Sun server for $15, I figured I had to put in a bid and see what happened. I could have used "buy it now" for $20, but I told myself that I didn't need it, and if it was really meant-to-be, then I'd win the auction at $15. And that's what I did.

I thought I was fairly familiar with most of Sun's server line since I've been a long-time fan of their systems, but I was completely unaware that they ever made anything this tiny. It's only 13" deep, fits in 1U of rackspace (which is perfect for me since I only have a half-depth rack at home). I upgraded the memory to 1GB using a few sticks of PC133 ECC CL2 memory I had lying around as well as a bigger/faster/cooler disk. It's got a pair of fast ethernet ports, a single USB 1.1 port, and a pair of serial ports - and that's it. No expandability what-so-ever. But that's fine. Both serial ports are RJ11 and uses the same pinout as a Cisco console (how pleasantly surprising yet convenient) and the first port doubles as the system console and as the interface to the integrated lights out management.

The ILOM is pretty cool - people complain about it on the web saying it's crap, but it seems pretty tight to me. Even when the system is powered off, the service processor is available, and lets you power the system up remotely, run diagnostics, or reboot the host. I really like that.

Here's the real icing on the cake though. The auction claimed it had a 500MHz UltraSPARC IIe processor, but when it got here, it only comes up as 400. Not really a terrible mistake, but I wrote the seller and mentioned it to them and they refunded my entire purchase price, including shipping.

Now I just need to figure out what I'm going to do with it. For now, it's got a fresh install of OpenBSD.