Sparky is my Sun SPARC 10 box. He came into my life a few years ago as a way for me to learn more about Unix administration (it worked). He served as my web server for a while, and then was put into duty as a MySQL server among other light fooling-around duties when I got my Ultra 1. A few months ago his hard drive failed, and I've just recently gotten around to bidding on a new drive for him on eBay. So, I have a 'new' 2.1G SCSI drive on the way, and more exciting, a pair of 125mhz Bridgeport processors to replace his current pair of 50mhz Sun SM50s. Well, it's exciting to me, anwyay.

If you have any inclination at all to run older high-quality Unix hardware, I recommend you do a little shopping on eBay for Sun SPARCs and UltraSPARCs. I just saw a 4x100mhz SPARC 20, with keyboard, mouse and monitor sell on eBay for $200. It's enough to make me cry. What a sweet machine. I paid $400 for sparky (just the system unit) a few years ago. These machines are easily up to the task of serving up web sites, running databases, doing SETI crunching (albeit slowly), routing, firewalling, etc., etc. They are very fine machines, and there's something really cool about running a machine in your house that used to cost $10-20k.