Hello all;

I am trying to find the age of my servers to provide a schedule of
replacement based on age. They are all mostly EOL'ed by SUN. I can get
the EOL date of them from Sunsolve, which, in the case of my old
Ultra-XX series servers, will tell me that they are at least that old,
but I have several that were EOL'ed in just the last year or so.

I have no paper trail to follow to get the purchase dates (am a new
admin to this site), and am wondering is there some handy-dandy Sun
link where you plug in your serial # and it comes back with the
manufacture date (or better yet; in-service date)?

Any other method (built-in to the PROM, or something like that), or
stamped somewhere on the chassis that I haven't found yet?

We have a wide variety of Sun servers;
Ultra-series -2. -5/10, -60, -80;
280R, 420R, 480R;
v120, v210, v880;
and one lonesome E450.

Any suggestions gratefully acknowledged.

Thnaks in advance

Joe D.

On Tue, 29 Aug 2006, Joe D. wrote:

> I have no paper trail to follow to get the purchase dates (am a new
> admin to this site), and am wondering is there some handy-dandy Sun
> link where you plug in your serial # and it comes back with the
> manufacture date (or better yet; in-service date)?

I think the Sun HW Handbook (linked to from SunSolve) has a section
on how to decode the system's serial number. Some of the digits
describe the year and week number of manufacture, so what you want
to do is feasible.

Good luck,

--
Rich Teer, SCNA, SCSA, OpenSolaris CAB member

President,
Rite Online Inc.

Voice: +1 (250) 979-1638
URL: http://www.rite-group.com/rich

Joe D. wrote:

> Hello all;
>
> I am trying to find the age of my servers to provide a schedule of
> replacement based on age. They are all mostly EOL'ed by SUN. I can get
> the EOL date of them from Sunsolve, which, in the case of my old
> Ultra-XX series servers, will tell me that they are at least that old,
> but I have several that were EOL'ed in just the last year or so.
>
> I have no paper trail to follow to get the purchase dates (am a new
> admin to this site), and am wondering is there some handy-dandy Sun
> link where you plug in your serial # and it comes back with the
> manufacture date (or better yet; in-service date)?
>
> Any other method (built-in to the PROM, or something like that), or
> stamped somewhere on the chassis that I haven't found yet?
>
> We have a wide variety of Sun servers;
> Ultra-series -2. -5/10, -60, -80;
> 280R, 420R, 480R;
> v120, v210, v880;
> and one lonesome E450.
>
> Any suggestions gratefully acknowledged.
>
> Thnaks in advance
>
> Joe D.
>

I don't see any benefit in replacing equipment solely on the basis of
age. You replace it because it can no longer do the job. You replace
it because the savings on maintenance will pay for a new one in two or
three years. And maybe you don't "replace" it at all, just recycle it
into some less demanding job. You can have a cycle in which the latest
and greatest runs production, the next newest runs test and QA, and the
oldest is the development machine.

If you must do it your way, you could look on Sunsolve at the "Handbook"
section. It will generally tell you when a system was first sold, last
order date, EOL date, etc.

In article <1156861395.732471.207550@m73g2000cwd.googlegroups .com>,
Joe D. <newbie_from_newbie@yahoo.com> wrote:
>I am trying to find the age of my servers to provide a schedule of
>replacement based on age. They are all mostly EOL'ed by SUN. I can get
>the EOL date of them from Sunsolve, which, in the case of my old
>Ultra-XX series servers, will tell me that they are at least that old,
>but I have several that were EOL'ed in just the last year or so.
>
>I have no paper trail to follow to get the purchase dates (am a new
>admin to this site), and am wondering is there some handy-dandy Sun
>link where you plug in your serial # and it comes back with the
>manufacture date (or better yet; in-service date)?


Not the answer, but a good fake is:

ls -altd /var/sadm/patch/*-* | tail -1

This will show you the the first patch installed on the system.
I believe some builds of Solaris actually include patches, and
many sysadmins patch every newly installed box (at least I do).

It may not be exact, but it should be reasonably close.



--
Scott Wilson Lead System Administrator
swilson@uchicago.edu NSIT - DCS - SeaSol

The first 3 or 4 numerical characters in the S/N is usually the year and
week of manufacture.
As an example a Sun Fire 280R with S/N 142C061A would have been made on the
42nd week of 2001.

I don't see any reason to start chucking systems as soon as they hit a
certain age.
However, if you're doing server consolidation to replace several less power
servers with a single machine that is always a good move.

Your:

Sun Fire V210
Sun Fire 280R
Sun Fire V480
Sun Fire V880

are all USIII and still good servers.
The Sun Fire V210 is still a currently sold product.
The rest have been EOL for not too long, but far from EOSL.

The other systems like the Ultra class machines are all EOL and if not EOSL
getting close to it in the next year or two.

Trinean

Joe D. <newbie_from_newbie@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I am trying to find the age of my servers to provide a schedule of
> replacement based on age. They are all mostly EOL'ed by SUN. I can get
> the EOL date of them from Sunsolve, which, in the case of my old
> Ultra-XX series servers, will tell me that they are at least that old,
> but I have several that were EOL'ed in just the last year or so.

Look at the serial number. The first one or two numbers (depending on
the model/exact age) will be the year it was made in. The next two will
be the week in that year it was made.

eg, a serial starting with "0625" was made in the 25th week of 2006.
"712" is the 12th week of 1997. 625 would be the 25th week of 1995 -
the missing 0 is the give away that it's 1996 and not 2006.

Scott

On 2006-08-29, Trinean <trinean@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Sun Fire V480
> Sun Fire V880
>
> are all USIII and still good servers.

Oh, no they aren't. They're all dangerous and should be shipped to
me for secure disposal.

--
Andre

Thanks to all who replied; Rich, helpful as always.

Also, the others who pointed out the serial # decoding thing. I found
a link on Sunsolve (its a private link you need a Sunsolve account to
access) that lays it out. Here's the link; I tried cut/paste here, but
it didn't pan out:


http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pri...?wrapper=false

Here's the basic layout cut from that page in case you can't get there:

Year year of manufacture
Week week of manufacture
Plant manufacturing location
Product type of system manufactured
Software Beginning in July 1997, systems manufactured with
Shop Floor Execution use C up to fff units/week and
D if more than fff units/week are built.
The Shop Floor System did not use this field.
Build number alphanumeric or hexadecimal build number

Also, thanks to those who pointed out that you don't replace a system
just because it's old, but rather because it is no longer performing
the job. That's my philosophy as well; this exercise is for budgetary
purposes, so we'll have money set aside for server replacement if
needed.

Once again, thanks to this forum, I'm all set on this issue; thank you
and good night!