Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

Take a FREE Test Drive of Sun’s newest and coolest technology!

This is cool! The idea of providing free public access to Unix systems so people can get a feel for the hardware, upcoming operating system releases and compilers – that idea seems to have dropped out of fashion recently. I’m glad to see it back, although I daresay in this modern era some people will whine and nitpick the license agreement under which the service is made available.

“You didn’t need to do sign that to use the DEC Alphas in 1993!” or somesuch… It’s free for 7 days. What else do you want, blood?

Oh yeah – you get root access in a Zone^H^H^H^H N1 Grid Container, too. 😎

The Technology Test Drive is a free service for developers and IT Staff. It allows you to test drive some of Sun’s great technology free of charge for 7 days! All of the configuring and installing is done for you! Simply sign up and start testing right away!*

The system is populated with the latest Sun Fire V20z and Sun Fire V40z AMD Opteron based Servers from Sun that deliver exceptional price/performance.

[…]

See [www.sun.com] for the full info and legal stuff.

⊞

Comments

6 responses to “Take a FREE Test Drive of Sun’s newest and coolest technology!”

  1. Katz

    That sounds great. Do they let you crash them or see if you can break into other “Zones?”

    Reply
  2. alecm
    re:

    beats me, but check the license and see what it says. i am spoiled with the existence of a S10 box of my own to play with.

    Reply
  3. sysadmn
    re: Take a FREE Test Drive of Sun’s newest and coolest technology!

    Unfortunately, the zones are walled off from the outside world. You have to ssh to a controller, then login from there. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to get source, binaries, or data onto the box – except by cutting and pasting over ssh. No sftp, no email, no outbound net as far as I can see. If I’m wrong, the demo period will be over before anyone answers my support question.

    So, great idea, Sun. There’s a small hitch in the execution, but this seems like a great showcase for Sol 10 and zones. I work for a big enough company that I’ll just call my rep and get a few v20z’s on long term loan :-).

    Reply
  4. alecm
    re: Take a FREE Test Drive of Sun’s newest and coolest technology!

    >Unfortunately, the zones are walled off from the outside world. You have to ssh to a controller, then login from there.

    So, no Solaris10 KaZaa port, then? 😎

    Reply
  5. Chris Samuel
    re: Take a FREE Test Drive of Sun’s newest and coolest technology!

    Are there any systems running Linux as part of this ?

    Reply
  6. alecm
    re: Take a FREE Test Drive of Sun’s newest and coolest technology!

    Interesting question – i don’t know, but at a wild guess i would expect the “Test Drive” to be primarily focused upon Solaris 10, the Studio compilers, and Opteron, as a kind of total suite…

    Reply

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