18 November 2007, 19:20 by mark hoekstra

...and a Sun to match


click to enlarge

...although I somehow have the feeling I’ve now got a whole bunch of solutions in my closet, all looking for problems which aren’t there (yet) but well, we’ll see about that ^_^


click to enlarge

Last week I received a Sun Netra T1 AC200 and I already received a Sun quad happy meal interface. This weekend, in between other things, I’ve been installing OpenBSD 4.2 on the last machine to go into my closet… well, for now.

And oh, there are fast ethernet devices on their way for my Cisco, so then this routing setup will be 100mbit full-duplex through-and-through (not that it can route 100mbit and/or that I’ve got a connection that fast, but still…)


click to go to my hinv-page

So, why? and what does it do?

Well… this is something I’ve got in my head for a long time and I’m not even sure if there’s any real use for it. Still, with this hardware going for scratch-prices I couldn’t resist to build this setup once again and spend time figuring everything out, refamiliarize myself with lots of network related stuff and just see how it runs. The Sun is used as a double transparent bridge, one before the Cisco and one behind it.

If you want to know more about transparent bridges and such, I guess this is a nice read.

When it turns out this Sun is more show than go than I probably will disconnect it after a while and use it for other purposes (btw this machine’s got Lights Out Management which enables me to turn it on and off through the serial port…). But, for now, I’ll use it for some experiments even though there are way too many screws I can turn!

The setup now looks like this:

cable modem <-> OpenBSD PF <-> Cisco IOS <-> OpenBSD PF <-> home-network

(both OpenBSD PFs run on the Sun, I made two transparent bridges on the four ports of the quad happy meal card)

“we have joy we have fun, we have Puffy on our Sun…”

riiight *^_^*

Something else, this being a quiet sunday and such, I thought I revise my network diagram, which was getting old after four(!) years. You can view (and even rate!) it overhere. (never mind the crappy rescaling…)

And as a last one, something totally different: this last week I also received pictures which I’ve put in a Flickr photoset, these pictures were made (by Bram Belloni) while I got interviewed a while ago.

P.S. Somehow my blogposts a lot of the times seem to go in threefold (3 times the iPhone, 3 times the CCC) which would mean the next one is about something totally different. right. ahem.

permalink - add to del.icio.us

  1. BOK @ 18 November 2007, 20:36 :

    Ahh, the pizzabox! Got one too here, but one disk is having a failure (like lots of Sun disks…). Man, this thing makes some noise! But LOM rocks indeed.



  2. Wallytgoat @ 23 November 2007, 04:58 :

    mmm… piiizzzzaaa… Well I like it, and the quad card makes me smile at what turned out to be an elegent filtering solution. Going to have to give the bridge idea a go though. Just came off of an upgrade, so now I have enough spare kit to put a usable box together… FUn FuN FUN!!! However, in my case not with a Sun! Thanks for playing muse Mark…



As mentioned in the Message from Mark's family this site has been made static. This means that it will be no longer possible to comment on his ideas and projects, but that we all can continue to cherish his creativity.

previous: a decent Cisco

next: resurrecting Elsie...