Yeah, I snapped it up because of it's small footprint, the fact that I didn't have a MIPS-based machine in my collection, and for the historical aspect. I love digging around the campus to try to find old, odd machines that people don't use/need anymore (I'm still trying to pry a dual DEC Alpha away from a guy
)
I was fortunate with this one as it supports a standard VGA-type monitor connection and, if no keyboard is hooked up, automatically will boot in serial terminal mode. I installed openssh so as to not need to have my serial port on my home machine used (I am driving a VFD display with it and some software I wrote up as my Senior Design project).
In response to
linux_0's post, the machine has the 200 MHz R5k MIPS with 384 megs of RAM and a ~4.3GB 7200RPM SCSI drive.
Really, the main thing that was additional over PXE that I had to contend with was directly telling the PROM environment where to find the bootable image server, while PXE handles that kinda thing automagically and provides you the nice list of available boot servers (assuming the servers are configured properly, of course).
The main things that I learned were how to setup DHCPD to dole out a static IP to a specific machine and send it a specific file on a BOOTP request, setting up TFTPD to allow downloading of a file after DHCPD told the o2 which image file to use, and most importantly that Radio Shack is a ripoff (I had a serial extension cable already, so the null modem + gender changer ended up being $19 before I returned it after using it
)