As some of you may know, today is the third Sunday of the month. And you know what that means: SCOSUG.

But, this time around, there’s a twist. Instead of the normal meeting-food-home thing, Steve IM’d me about the Sun UltraSparc 1s he’s been meaning to give me. He said he’d drop them off and give me a ride to the meeting, then went on cleaning. He dug up a lot more stuff, and he said he’d give that to me, too.

That itself is awesome. I haven’t completed inventorying yet, but it’s excellent stuff. A 21″ CRT monitor (it makes the 17″ that it’s dualscreened with look punny), the two UltraSparc 1s, a Commodore 128 + stuff for it and the books/software, a box of LinuxJournal issues going back a LONG ways, an Iomega tapedriver and some 2gb tapes, and that cat barcode scan thing.

Getting the monitor hooked up was an interesting task. It was sitting face-down on my bed, three feet from the desk. I began the process by moving the 15″ monitor that went to bell off the desk, then moving the 17″ to where the 15″ stood. I unpluged it and put it onto the second port on the video card. Then I googled the 21″ model number to get the frequencies and fixed the Xorg config.

Finally, the task of moving the monitor to the desk came. It was a tricky process. The monitor weighs a feathing ton, and it would be difficult to move it three feet. So, I turned it over, then me and my dad shoved it down onto my rolling chair. We rolled it three feet to the desk, and hefted it up onto the edge, then pushed.

With the monitor in place, I plugged shit in, and I punched the on buttons. One /etc/init.d/gdm start later, I had it perfect. One 21″ and one 17″ at 1024×768 running together. Pwnage.

Next came the Suns. I took a look at them, and put them into the printer stand. The monitor and keyboard were both special Sun Microsystems things which I don’t have. I’m going to need to go to radio shack to get a null modem cable so I can use minicom instead of a monitor.

I haven’t touched the C128 yet, or the magazines. I’m too tired.

Now, you think I got all of this stuff and then went to SCOSUG, right? Wrong!

Steve works for the Yale Med School’s IT department. So, before the meeting, he gave me a tour of the server room and his office. The server room was impressive.

When you walk in, you get blasted back by the powerful jet engine sound of a bazillion servers running. There must have been like 15-20 TB of storage in that room. He showed me all of the servers and told me what they did. There were also several cages with just harddrives in them. Lots and lots and lots of drives.

Then there was the tape robot. This thing was as big as a fucking hallway. I mean, WOW. Roughly 7TB of tape in there. It. Was. Massive.

Then I saw the firewall thing. It was cool, because he telnetted into the actual firewall box and it had a nice shell. He showed me some of the rules and how it worked.

Then we went to the office. There were three cubicles he showed me, one the testing lab, one his, and one storage. The testing lab was a mess of cables and boxen. His cubicle was a bit neater. He had two desktops, and then a sort of wireless gateway thing he was working on (it was to force people to register their machines if they hadn’t already done so).

A lot of cool stuff. At SCOSUG, we had a discussion on the future of the group instead of a normal presenation (not many people showed, but damnit, this is something that had to be done!). It looks like a website overhaul is pretty definite, and the meeting format was discussed.

But yea. Sleep now.