You get what you pay for...
I took reception on a non-descript but very large box at work today. Very heavy too. I got it tipped up on its side since there were no "delicate" or "handle carefully" notations anywhere on it. Its insides shifted and made a nice, hefty clunk and metallic rattle. Thinking it was odd, but not unreasonable, I left it standing on it's edge all day until I had time to get back to it. I had to go move literally a ton of CRTs around, some nifty ones, and one glaringly "not too shabby" 21" Mitsubishi Diamondscan monitor. Tucked all of that away into various hidey-holes I have secured over my time working up on campus. I get back to my shop and it's time to tear into that box. My boss says it's supposed to be a Sun Microsystem's Sunfire v280R. I am shocked, and feel bad for standing it up on its ass end now. So I take it down and he and I both get it un-boxed and laid out, ready to install into our rack. Someone's done us the favor of dropping it on it's nose and crushing the flange plates that secure it to the rack. NBD - Pliers and some twisting of metal has it straightened out. Sure, it's old crap, but it is newer and better crap than the crappity crap we already have... right? We're going to move services we host on aging E-250's onto this machine. George informs me it's fully loaded, over 1.2 GHz on a pair of UltraSPARC III Cu+'s, 8 GB banks of RAM, and dual fiber channel SCSI drives for a total of a little over 40 GB of storage. Definitely an upgrade from our rusty E-250's. He then informs me, "It only cost us $900 out of some old military surplus!" I was aghast, that's a good price on one of these used...
So I bust some more balls hauling this thing up to the rack after I get the rails on it, give it power - and find NO mouse, keyboard, or video hookup. NONE. Okay, no big deal, wait for it to boot and then try to SSH into it or at worse, read info off the diag console that fires up on Serial-B when these machines run headless. I push the power button...
She lights up.
Fan test.....WHOOOOOSH!
Starts to boot off of Disc-0 and fans drop in speed. Clickety-clatter...
Service/Fault light blinks, then goes steady. PSU-1 also shows loss of main power. Blink, pop, VOOOOoooooooooooorrrrrrr....*silence* Steady fault/service light. PSU-1 shows blinking random mains current from AC source still. Wiggling the PSU or the power cable doesn't make it stop. The hard fault/service light is now on even brighter if possible and now the one on PSU-1 is on steady...
We paid someone juuuuuust about what this thing is worth IMO at this point. I pull it out on its rack rails and proceed to remove the screws after removing mains power and turning the key locks for power and the case lid. Every single screw head to access the interior is rounded out.
Time to call it a day.
So I bust some more balls hauling this thing up to the rack after I get the rails on it, give it power - and find NO mouse, keyboard, or video hookup. NONE. Okay, no big deal, wait for it to boot and then try to SSH into it or at worse, read info off the diag console that fires up on Serial-B when these machines run headless. I push the power button...
She lights up.
Fan test.....WHOOOOOSH!
Starts to boot off of Disc-0 and fans drop in speed. Clickety-clatter...
Service/Fault light blinks, then goes steady. PSU-1 also shows loss of main power. Blink, pop, VOOOOoooooooooooorrrrrrr....*silence* Steady fault/service light. PSU-1 shows blinking random mains current from AC source still. Wiggling the PSU or the power cable doesn't make it stop. The hard fault/service light is now on even brighter if possible and now the one on PSU-1 is on steady...
We paid someone juuuuuust about what this thing is worth IMO at this point. I pull it out on its rack rails and proceed to remove the screws after removing mains power and turning the key locks for power and the case lid. Every single screw head to access the interior is rounded out.
Time to call it a day.