I agree with all of this.

For me, I think the best “I want the SPARC experience with minimum fuss” boxes are the SS 5/20 (which are very similar machines, the SS20 is sort of a multiprocessor SS5) or the Ultra 1/2 desktop workstations. All of those are SBUS machines (there are PCI machines with the Ultra 2 CPU and chipset, too, I think, but they’re not just called “Ultra 2”?).

I also think of Solaris 7 as peak Solaris, I don’t think you’re alone there @[email protected] . If you want something past Solaris 7, just go with OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana/etc. and do “new Solaris” whole hog.

I have a set of GPIO boards for my PDP-11s, I’ve been wanting to turn one of them into a G-code interpreter.

You need a VPN or a reverse proxy or similar for this.

What you want is either a service that gives you an IP address unrelated to your physical location (a VPN), or a machine that is willing to accept connections for you and forward them transparently to your machine (a reverse proxy).

You can set up your own VPN to proxy connections by getting a host from ~any hosting service and running something like OpenVPN on it.

I have/had nothing to do with retrocomputing on any large corporate sites, but I’m a mod on https://retrocomputingforum.com/ and look forward to seeing what happens here. I don’t necessarily need or want a mod role, but I’m happy to help out in any way I can.