SUN SunFire V480

I first came across this machine on FaceBook Marketplace about an hour south of my location. As much as I wanted the machine as Sun machines arent readily available in my area I decided to pass for the time being. The price was a little higher than I wanted to spend, and I had plenty of other projects that I needed to work on. To my dismay, it didn't last long and someone else snagged it up. As luck would have it, it showed up again on Marketplace about 30 minutes North of me! What luck! The price was still higher than I wanted to spend so I talked myself out of it again. About 6 months go by, and the listing still wasn't marked as sold, so I decided to reach out and see if they would take an offer. No response, darn, it must have sold and I missed my chance! Oh well, plenty of other machines to work on and get running again. About 6 months pass again, and a friend reaches out and says "Hey, theres a SunFire for sale in the area for a reasonable price!" I check out the link, and its the machine I saved a year earlier! The price dropped to $50, what a deal! I reach out immediatly and was able to work out a deal.

The previous owners knew nothing about it, other than a friend of the family left it at their house with no intention of coming back for it. They got tired of tripping over it, and having it take up a ton of space and decided to list it.

Starting from square one, I decided to just plug it in and see what happens. After plugging in a serial cable and powering it on, to my suprise it started loading Solaris 10! Of course I had no documentation as to the password etc, but I had no intention of leaving 10 on it anyway. Popping open the DVD drive, sure enough there was a burned copy of Solaris 10 in the drive. Bonus! Luckily there were two 74GB HDD's in it. It takes special FC-AL HDD's instead of a typical SCSI interface. I started taking it apart to check out the insides, and see how clean it is. After taking the top cover off I am greeted with a battery bomb from the RSC (Remote Service Controller) card. It leaked all over the RSC and the PCI motherboard. It didn't look horrible, but you could see plenty of crusty chips and weird solder joints. Time for a vinegar bath to neutrilize the acid!

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