Sun's Field Engineer and System Handbooks Online

A Public Archive located in Sydney, Australia

Maintained by Craig Dewick

Welcome to my Sun Microsystems Field Engineer Handbook and System Handbook archive. This archive is totally free of charge to explore and reference from other places (such as listings on Ebay, etc.).

Sun's Field Engineer Handbooks and System Handbooks are an invaluable source of Sun hardware information, particularly for people like myself who like Sun hardware and operate it at home, or in my case, also run a small surplus IT business that specialises in used Sun and compatible equipment.

Usage Warning: This archive has been the subject of protracted threats of legal action from Sun Microsystems since September 2002. It is the qualified opinion of myself and many other people in the IT community that the Field Engineer Handbooks and System Handbooks do not contain any data or information which could be considered to be confidential and/or trade-secret, or would be likely to harm Sun's business or mislead Sun's customers. If that was really the case Sun would not sell the material in printed or electronic formats in the first place!

Sun's early versions of the Field Engineer Handbooks were not available in electronic form, however since 1998 Sun has been producing both CD-ROM and printed editions. The versions stored in this archive are from the CD-ROM editions. Sun revamped the Field Engineer Handbooks in December 2000 and re-launched them as the System Handbook.

Two other sites to check for online Sun documentation are docs.sun.com and infoserver.sun.com. The latter site requires you to have a Sun service contract password to access anything, but the docs.sun.com site is in the public domain. You can also access the very latest version of Sun's System Handbook from sunsolve.sun.com but you'll probably need a SunSolve login or service contract ID to view any of the material not available from Sun's official public System Handbook portal.

The SunShack is an independent, public domain website located in Sydney, Australia and has absolutely no connection with Sun Microsystems Inc. in the USA, or with Sun Microsystems here in Australia. All information is provided here entirely free of charge with no warranty or guarantee of any kind. Please read and familiarise yourself with our full legal statement if you're unsure of your rights and responsibilities before using any of the information presented here.

Sun's SunSolve Website System Handbook Document Collections
Sun Part #	Entry	CD	Print	Released	Additional Notes
SunSolve		n/a	n/a	current	Sun's public (non-contract) System Handbook portal
SunSolve		n/a	n/a	current	Sun's private (contract) System Handbook portal
My CD-ROM Field Engineer Handbook Document Archives
Sun Part #	Entry	CD	Print	Released	Additional Notes
798-1210-01		1.0	18th	November 1998	the very first CD-ROM FEH!
798-1210-02		1.1	19th	March 1999	update release
798-1210-03		1.2	19th	July 1999	update release
798-1210-04		1.3	20th	February 2000	last in original format (note 1)
798-1210-05		1.4	20th	May 2000	first in new format (note 1)
798-1210-06		1.5	20th	October 2000	Sun spares list dropped
My CD-ROM System Handbook Document Archives
Sun Part #	Entry	CD	Print	Released	Additional Notes
798-3658-01		1.0	1st	January 2001	the very first CD-ROM SH!
798-3658-02		1.1	?	June 2001	update release
798-3658-03		2.0	?	April 2002	Completely revised (note 2)
798-3658-04		2.1	?	March 2003	update release
?		2.1.2	?	December 2003	update release
?		2.1.8	?	April 2005	update release

Notes and Acknowledgements:

1. - Sun decided to change the FEH format to match that used on Sun's corporate website CD-ROM FEH when 1.4 was conceived. CD-ROM FEH v1.3 was the last in the original format, and v1.4 was the first in the revamped format.

2. - The April 2002 and later versions of the System Handbook includes much more data and images, etc. than previous Field Engineer Handbook and System Handbook editions, however a lot of the important service information documents are only available through controlled-access sites such as the Sun Partner Exchange. Also, access to much of the material on SunSolve (especially Solaris and application patches) has been severely restricted since mid-2007.

3. - A big thankyou to the various people who have contributed to this archive - without their assistance most of the information would not be available to the Sun user community and possibly 'lost' as Sun tries to erase it's past.

You Can Help to Keep this Resource Updated! If you can provide recent or missing versions of the System Handbook on CD-ROM or DVD-ROM so that they can be added to this valuable archive resource, please let me know! Remember to unpoison the email address to remove the anti-spam feature. Your assistance in keeping this resource updated would be greatly appreciated. Full credit will be given if requested to any versions of the System Handbook you contribute copies of.

---

This page has been accessed times.

If there is anything you'd like to ask me, send me some email. Remember to unpoison the email address to remove the anti-spam feature.

back to the Sun Shack Data Archive

(c) 2002-2007. This page remains the property of Craig Dewick and SRK Science and Technology Research at all times.