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Comment by geoffeg | Hacker News Reader

I miss Sun hardware, especially in the sun4c era. Everything was so solidly built and well thought out compared to a lot of PC hardware. The IPC/IPX is still one of my favorite form factors.

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I still have an IPC on my desk as a monitor stand. In 1996 I used it as a router for my 24hour 56kbps modem connection, serving all of 204.94.173.x - I was paying tlg.org $145/mo for my Class C address space, and all my home machines were just hanging out there. that is the internet I really miss.

I have been thinking about getting an old IPC or IPX and swapping out the internals with a modern PC motherboard and components, but only if I can do it cleanly. I haven't done it due to not having enough free time and... it just feels wrong to me in some way.

Ah the trouble of finding a unix workstation with a pristine case and thoroughly cooked interior so you don't feel bad about gutting it for a casemod. Call me when you find one.

I hear you. For most of the 90's, I had my home network on a publicly routed /24, no firewall.

Hosted my own domain and mail server right under my desk...

Same! I now have the /24 routed over a wireguard tunnel. About 5 years back I was able to register my own ASN and set up peering through a VPS.

Same! My IPC served my domain using Solaris on a nailed up bonded ISDN circuit until someone filled the root disk trying to patch the rpc.cmsd remote exploit. After that it was BSDs until I settled on OpenBSD.

Ditto here. I loved their hardware from that era up until the early 2000s. I still have a few dozen systems from those years in my basement. I tried getting rid of them years ago using the Marie Kondo method, but they all SPARC joy...

Hahaha :)

I can remember carrying a Sun machine around for demos in '95 or so - the IPX was easy to carry but the monitor less than easy. What I particularly remember is getting the occasional electric shocks from the monitor when carrying it (presumably from energy stored in capacitors) and being really careful not to drop it as our two person company only had one Sun monitor!

My first homebrew wireless AP was an old SPARCclassic with the now-rare SBus PCMCIA adapter and a Orinoco Gold, running IIRC Debian Potato.

Still a very cool form factor, though nowadays beware that the PSU is a cap goop timebomb:

https://users.glitchwrks.com/~glitch/2017/07/24/ipc-recap

I greatly enjoy the Sun3 and Sun4c/Sun4m era, always under SunOS 4. Probably because that's what I started on with my first UNIX account (Grex). Probably why I still prefer the BSD-style distros nowadays.

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