I just got my hands on an ultra 10 that was going out of use. I got it home, pluged it in, booted it up. Every thing was working fine, it ran great for a couple days. Today i log in and the clock applet in XFCE is going nuts changing time around at random, the screen would go into "power saver mode" if i stoped moving the mouse for a second. Then it droped to the console, went down on a signal 15 and shut off. Now it wont boot. I turn it on, the lights on the keyboard light up, the cd rom will open and shut, i can hear the fan running. But thats all i cant get to OBP, solaris wont boot. So is the box a paper weight now? Cuz im at a loss, anyone have any ideas?

It looks like an hardware failure, probably difficult to fix through the forum ...

You can have a look inside to see if obvious clues appears (overheat components, ...) and exercise the internal connectors, may help if bad contacts are the source of problems.

Yeah im sure its a hardware failure, i was just hoping someone who knows a little bit about Sparc might be able to give me an idea of what it might be (or if any parts on the ultra 10s have a tendency to fail). Anyway thanks for the help.

U10 have no particular tendency to fail, I've seen bunch of them running 24/7 for years with no problems.

From the symptoms you describe, it looks like a main board failure, but can easily be any other like power-supply, memory, CPU ...

Did you looked inside the U10 as I suggested to you ? Sometimes broken components are easily detectable.

My advice on connectors was not given out of experience. You wrote you moved the U10 home thus something may have been displaced inside.

Ok i found out whats wrong, the power button in the front (the one that boots the system and shuts it down, not the hard on/off switch on the power supply) was bad. if i touch the 2 wires together it boots fine. I guess the contacts went bad or something and it was just in a contiunal state of "off". Thanks for everyones help!