I've been trying to come up with a good pseudonym for the organization that I am the technical director for so that I can talk about it here without confusing what I am writing with whatever I am doing in my real job for Sun. How about Unnamed Social Network Site... or USNS for short? I suppose it really does not matter and that is easy enough to type.
 
A friend of mine donated a spare 1U server to USNS recently. We are currently leasing a server with our co-lo and it is not meeting our needs anymore. The donated server is not "new", but it was free and it should meet our current workloads. Like most non-profits, we operate on a shoestring budget and not having to pay to lease a server every month, especially one that cannot handle peak usage, is a big improvement for us.
 
Step one for the migration from the old server to the new server (and from Ubuntu to OpenSolaris) is getting the new server ready to be taken to the co-lo. Since the co-lo is on the other side of the country and we have no remote console set up, I need the OS installed before the machine is delivered to them. One of the members of my technical team, who lives in the same area of the country as the co-lo, will be doing this for me and then delivering the machine. It will be a great test of all the changes that have been made to the download and install process for OpenSolaris. I think the process is really easy, but I've been working with Solaris for a long time. Will someone with no Solaris/OpenSolaris experience see it the same way? I am about to find out. If all goes well, we'll have the new server online by the end of the month.