Netra X1

For some terrible reason I picked up a bunch (five) Sun Netra X1's a couple years ago during a visit to Re-PC

Unfortunately these machines are terrible for a multitude of reasons!

Unlike their "Netra T1" counterparts the X1's were built to be as cheap as possible.

Netra X1's all come with either a 400Mhz or 500Mhz UltraSPARC IIe CPU.

400Mhz models can accept a maximum of 1GB of PC133 RAM, 500Mhz models can accept 2GB

All models come equipped with dual 10/100 "DEC Tulip" ethernet ports and up to two 40GB IDE hard disks, with proprietary mounts

Like all Sun machines the servers require an RJ45-to-RS232 cable connected in order to access OpenFirmware.

Here's some of the many problems you as a Sun Netra X1 owner can expect to encounter

Bad capacitors! These machines were built to be as cheap as possible. As such the capacitors will probably have already leaked, or are very excited to do so. Make sure you replace them!

Extremely flaky ALi controller. Sun decided that in order to meet cost they would simply use as many "x86 parts" as possible. The chipset in use is from the notoriously bad ALi and will give you no end of annoying problems

Large hard disks won't work. Anything over 120GB seems to make the ALi controller just fall over dead

Memory: You need to find PC133 ECC RAM. Good luck, that stuff is expensive. And the 4 slots are angled in such a way as to make it incredibly annoying to install or remove that RAM!

The ethernet chips are rated for "10/100 operation", but due to the crappy ALi controller and a lack of DMA, iperf tests seem to cap out at around 2MB/s while pinning the poor CPU at 100% utilization

Linux support is non-existent! The bad ALi controller seems to reset itself on boot under Linux which causes the IDE hard disks to simply...disappear! Rendering the root filesystem inaccessible

Unsurprisingly with all of the above issues my Netra X1's are not in use, and are unlikely to be used in the foreseeable future