Hello,

At the computer science department of the University of Tromsø, Norway
we have a few dozen HPPA machines that will be phased out in the next
few weeks. Reason is they run HPUX 9 which is not Y2K compliant and
this will not be fixed. They won't be upgraded to HPUX 10 either, but
instead will be phased out. If we have no free OS available for these
machines to run, they will be send to our computer graveyard. I'm 
interested in keeping these machines alive in order to use them as
`basement-servers' in our home networks for example.

Unfortunately, we cannot (are not allowed as a government funded
institute) give away hardware even not if we label it as junk
or obsolete (thus we have a big computer graveyard). It's even
difficult to lend hardware out to people that are not affiliated
with our university in any way (although we could try that if 
asked for).

What we can do is make (some of) these machines available to
interested students here that may want to spend time on getting
NetBSD/OpenBSD to work on them. Possibly we could setup another
machine to act as netboot server for them. We can also give
just anybody remote access to these machines if that would be
useful for further *BSD development. We're willing to spend
some time and energy in setting up the hardware for this, and
try to collect a group of interested students. However, setting
up a complete porting project is most likely beyond our 
capabilities and available time. But I think we may be able
to contribute with hardware and student/man-power to an existing
project or be part of a new one. I don't know yet how much
interested students we could attract to such an effort (or how
good they are), but if there's outside *BSD interest for such 
a thing we'll make an effort in getting the people and the hardware
together here. I'd also like to get a bit of an idea what the
status is of existing porting projects if any¸ so that I can
judge the level of (technical and organizational) expertise
required to start contributing.

So, if you're interested or have comments/questions...
please let me know (and CC me personally as I'm not on the
netbsd-ports list).

Feico Dillema.