On Sep 8, 2026, at 11:09 AM, Ethan O'Toole via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
On another subject, I still slowly fish around for 5ESS phone switches. My goal was to reduce the footprint to get it into a rack or two, and try to find more than one. I've read that you can run the management platform (the Admin module) on a Sun host with an emulator, but not sure if a PCI card is needed. They use Netra T1125ish -- probably why those DC versions existed. As well as the ones for listening into phone calls (CALEA.) Netra T1 takes that down to 1u. Then CM, SM and DC power remains.
My hope was to find a number of them and put them in hands of various museums. East, maybe SysSrc if Bob wants one, Bloop, etc. Then they could be networked via ShadyTel or something. I dunno. So far it's been hard to make the right connections, and I've seen the videos where people ended up with qty 24 x 21" telco racks and that isn't appealing at the moment due to space.
I've got a Sparc Enterprise T5240 (very similar to the Netra T5220) in decent shape that I've not really made any use of over the past five years (too loud for my basement since the move), so if you need hardware to run any switches you find and that suits, you're welcome to it. It's 2U, so not quite as tiny, but it has a full complement of RAM and will run Solaris 10 and 11 (currently running 11, but rarely). - Dave