Yup, made a standalone CD player from a CDR just for kicks last year. Works just fine, coax in to your DAC. Have fun. :thmbsp:
PS:
Here's the link to my little project
I like your thread. I, too, was a Sun sysadmin in another life, and also have a soft spot for old Sun hardware. When I quit, Solaris 8 was just being rolled out, first one that ran on PC's I recall, Solaris 7 was my last OS certification which is, oooh, about 10 years ago? Sun equipment is so well built... one of our clients was a hospital and I recall being just stumped trying to find a particular router when upgrading some hardware in their network. Turns out that a comm closet had been repartitioned and an old headless Sun IPX machine running SunOS set up as a router had been sealed up behind a wall.
For 6 years. Never missed a beat. Never crashed. We threw out SO MUCH of that type of hardware, like the standalone drive enclosures you used for your project. And 1Gb and 2Gb SCSI hard drives. And small CRT monitors. None of this stuff was broken in any way. I still have a drawer full of switches, LED's, power supply boards, etc. from this era.
When I started with the company I now work for (<10 employees) I spent maybe $500 setting up a linux-based server system using an new generic PC box, a couple of SCSI RAID cards and a used Sun StorEdge array box off eBay. Hot-swap, hot spare, redundant everything, that system hasn't had a down day in 9 years, and because I buy older drives it is CHEAP to maintain. Just picked up 10 72Gb 10K SCSI drives for $30 on that auction site. Yes, $30!
