This Old SPARC
The story of a geek and his Sun SPARCstations (and UltraSPARCs), and the trials, tribulations,
and small victories that go with the care and feeding of such a menagerie.
Thursday, November 30, 2000
Man, do I ever want one of these: the Sun Blade 1000. Maybe five years from now they'll be affordable. One can always hope.
posted by Mike Thomas 11/30/2000 10:27:38 PM
Monday, November 27, 2000
I had to finally give in and take my 20D10 monitor into the shop. The picture, which has always been shifted to the left to some degree, is finally shifted far enough to the left that it really annoys me. There's about a 1" black strip down the right side of the monitor. I thought this would be a simple internal "trim" adjustment to fix, but the guy at the shop says it's not so simple. Turns out these monitors are fully digitally controlled, and the fix for this particular problem is a fairly complex replacement of either a board or a component of a board. To make it worse, the monitor has to be disassembled to do the fix, but when it's disassembled it can't be tested. Anyway, all of this has me shopping for replacements just in case. There's a flat-panel monitor on eBay that looks really juicy, but I'm sure it will become to expensive. The new 19" models seem to be going for a reasonable rate, however. We'll see how this turns out.
posted by Mike Thomas 11/27/2000 07:58:22 AM
Sunday, November 19, 2000
OK, I got JDK 1.2.2 and TomCat installed on sparky. It took a while, because I had a lot of false starts on just how to get the software onto sparky. First, I thought I'd just download the JDK to sparky. However, Sun really went out of their way to prevent that with a draconian and buggy "login" process to javasoft.com. It wanted me to log in. I know I've gotten stuff from the site before, but I'd fogotten my login name and pasword. Luckily, they have a feature you can use to have that info mailed to you. So, I did that. But, then, armed with the correct login ID and password, I still couldn't get in. So, I re-registered, using the same info that I was mailed (as an experiment). Sure enough, it said that the ID was a dupe (so, is it active or not?). I gave in and created another ID. This got me into the site, but I discovered that the download was 20+ meg. I don't have the patience for that.
I decided to try to get the JDK off of one of the many CD-ROMS I have that likely contain the software (Java JumpStart). Stupidly, I didn't use a web browser to look at the CD contents, so I wasted a lot of time mounting and umounting the CD from buzz onto sparky and browsing from sparky trying to find stuff. I finally got smart and opened the index.html file in the root of the CD in a browser session on buzz, and found what I wanted there. However, when it came time to "download" the software, I got a permission error when trying to save the file to the sparkyhome mountpoint I'd created on buzz. Sigh. Gotta learn more about NFS, I guess. So, I "downloaded" locally to buzz. I then tried a couple more times to copy over the NFS mount without success. Running out of patience, I just ftp'd the file over.
Installing was dirt simple. I just did a "chmod +x" on the .bin file on sparky and ran it from my opt directory there. Smooth as silk. Updated the PATH export in my .profile and I was golden.
I next ftp'd the TomCat .tar file from buzz over to sparky and installed that. Again, simple as pie. I ran the tomcat.sh script and TomCat started right up. I switched over to buzz and typed "http://sparky:8080" into the URL of a Netscape session, and the TomCat home page came up. Woohoo!
Having accomplished all this, I now have sparky set up as a test environment for doing servlet and JSP development. I'm probably going to move my hosting to AO Industries, which is well-rated and supports servlets and JSPs (among a lot of other server-side scripting technologies).
posted by Mike Thomas 11/19/2000 10:48:56 PM
I got TomCat installed on buzz today. It was pretty darn easy, and it came up just fine with no real effort on my part. However, I want to let sparky be the web server, so I need to get TomCat onto him, which means I've got to get the JDK onto him, which I'm not up to at the moment. Eventually I'll get stuff set up the way I want.
posted by Mike Thomas 11/19/2000 05:41:57 PM
Tuesday, November 14, 2000
I think I've said it before, but no news is good news. Life with sparky and buzz has been going smoothly. Of course, if I were pressed I'd admit that about all I do is web browse on buzz. Sparky's just kind of sitting there all fat and happy, waiting for something to do. Eventually, I'll get around to setting up TomCat, etc., on the boys and do a little Java development. I'd like to take my web site "in-house", and develop private services by which I can update the content. Yes, I know, there are services (like Blogger) out there, and I use them, but I'd like to have my own custom stuff just for me. I think I can also write some interesting and useful browser-based goodies to draw people into my site (like implementing a better Sailboat Performance Analyzer).
One thing is bugging me a lot, though. My Sun monitor has decided to shift its horizontal phase, and thus my work area is spilling off the left side of the monitor. It's already adjusted to the max right position, and won't go any farther. I've got about 1/2 inch of black border on the right side of my screen. This is very distressing. I'm hoping I can take it to a shop and they can do an internal adjustment. Otherwise, I'll just have to buy another off of eBay.
posted by Mike Thomas 11/14/2000 10:08:57 PM
I got a nice mail from the guy that maintains this neat and elegant site: jeffr.net. Thanks for the kind words, Jeff!
posted by Mike Thomas 11/14/2000 09:57:24 PM
|
