I admitted it was probably folly, but I got the Sun Fire X4600 M2. It's in the lab, but still not running.

First, a tiny gripe about the delivery. It's an 80-pound server. A giant heavy box filled with CPU and RAM. Granted, the FedEx guys didn't know that; it was in a U-Haul Wardrobe box, afterall. Still, when I met them to get the thing (after they tried and failed to deliver it a day earlier than their e-mail suggested), they were rolling the thing over like a giant square boulder. Like, maybe use a hand-truck for the heavy things? Yes, a little bit of the front bezel broke off, but the rest seems OK.

One thing I didn't glean from the docs is that you need to run power through all four of the PSUs to get it to fire up. After it's running, you can pull two of them, but they drop down to a redundant mode, so it's just extra fans, it seems.

It took a little tinkering to get the service port on the network. Mostly I had to identify the device on my network (there are 29 legit devices now), and then connect. After I connected the first time I thought to be smart and have the DHCP server give it a fixed address, but that caused havoc and I had to wait for all manner of expirations before I could connect again.

Then, the moment of truth...it fired right up! Woot! I had already made a DVD to install a LINUX on it, but for whatever reason I can't insert the disk. I also have a bootable USB flash, and that seemed to work. Running the memory test fails (probably isn't built for 8xCPU and 128GB of RAM), but the installer app fires up, asks what language to use, and then complains that it can't find the Internet, which matches what's plugged in.

Also...it can't see the hard drives. They don't get lights (the T5220 always has lights on the drives, which flicker when there's activity), and you can't hear them spin.

After some trying to get into the BIOS, it seems they aren't detected by the RAID controller.

After some more checking, it seems that the (sigh) firmware needs to be updated to support the larger drives. Probably other important features of more modern OSs and the virtualization stuff I want to play with on the thing.

And, of course, Oracle hates Sun, and they make it nearly impossible, or at least unrealistically expensive, to try to get a firmware, or a support contract that would allow you to get the firmware. Especially on these old, legacy machines.

I thought it was folly. I'm still going to try a little longer. Can anyone else get the firmware and share it? Heh.