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Recycling Vintage Alphas with Debian
robstah writes: "Vintage Alpha based systems, such as the DECstation are often available going cheap at auctions or free from a skip as companies 'upgrade' to PCs. As many goverments now want to prevent computers from ending up in landfill one solution is for us geeks to recycle. How? Installing Debian of course. Debian Planet has a great article on installing Debian on vintage Alphas."
The DECstation is not based on the Alpha processor,
but rather on MIPS R2000-R4000. They were not very powerful, say, 386 or 486 level. Alpha was the
next generation after MIPS based DECs.
Someone on here will know this.
I thought the "DEC Station" was a MIPS beast and the Alphas went by another name?
Anyone know? Were there both MIPS- and Alpha-based DEC Stations?
"Never bullshit a bullshitter" All That Jazz
is a nearby CS department.
The one at my local university recently got rid of around ten SPARCstation 5s. One is sitting on my desk. (running Solaris, though, as I want to use the SunPC accelerator it has).
You have to be careful, though - the 170Mhz turbosparc in this isn't supported very well under linux - it froze in the middle of X - although OpenBSD worked quite nicely.
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
I have two old DEC Multia's powered by 166 mhz Alphas. I think it is wonderful to see some attention being given to these fun older platforms. For the longest time I was just messing with old builds of RH on them.... but Debian is the way to go for sure. I've played around with some of the BSD's (I run FreeBSD on my desktop), but didn't ahve much luck. Debain is the next best pick for me.
I highly recommend picking up one of these machines if you want somethign fun to play around with. They can be had for next to nothing on Ebay or Yahoo Auctions. Mine cost me 35 bucks a piece I believe...and they had never been opened form the packing! Integrated sound.....ethernet, PC Card slot.... and the slide out mothboard tray just looks sweet:)
Man, if I cluster a few dozen I might be able to gather up 350Mhz to run a wicked Quake1 server!
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I've often been intrigued by some of the older Unix workstations, particularly Alphas (for their wide compatibility with PC hardware, of which I have an abudance, and the mystique they carried when they were new). Articles like this insist that people are just throwing these things away, and you can get truckloads of them for nominal cost.
But everything I've seen, on eBay and elsewhere on the net, has been, while maybe inexpensive and even cheap, totally out of proportion to the cost for older PC and even Mac hardware. As the benchmarks in that article show, a 21066 Multia with no cache is barely faster than a 486 at half the clock speed. And yet a loaded multia can still sell for upwards of $200. And the AT-format 21066 board based on the same architecture as the Multia can cost $50 alone (with CPU). I can get a box of 486 or Pentium boards for that much. And of course there is much more abundant binary-packaged software that will run on those.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
I have a 500mhz Alpha at home that used to be a system for running Lightwave at work.
Since both Microsoft and NewTek decided to stop supporting the Alpha architecture, its been sitting in a corner collecting dust.
I attempted to install Linux on this beast about 3 months ago, and realized that it had a BIOS specifically made for WinNT.. a blue menu with no such option as "switch to digital unix" as the article mentions. No way to boot from a floppy or CD either. (though i think it has an option to reinstall NT...)
After spending long hours reading HowTos and articles I finally just gave up.
If you plan on buying a cheap Alpha system for these purposes, do some research first on the model and BIOS type.
Before you can install Debian on an Alpha, you got to first find an Alpha. That's hard to find in Down DownUnder, ie New Zealand (except for my sysadmin, who tends to retire old work machines into his own basement ;-)
I monitored an online auction site (trademe.co.nz) for a while, with no luck. And these old workstations seem to be quite common and quite cheap, say in eBay... I am so jealous.
I want a VMS system! That's what I'd like to get MY hands on an Alpha system for. Either that or I'll have to wait for freeVMS to get off the ground...hooah!
You're using her as bait, Master!
Even then, Slash traffic was heavy. Mod:perl groaned on this host! It was a testament to the DEC folks that it ran with more than a couple hundred connections at all! After all, the Multia was a severely compromised Alpha design, which mated the CPU to a PC-style I/O bus.
Bandwidth consumption forced the removal of Slashdot to real hosting. Was this in '98? Anyhow, shortly thereafter VA donations (pre Andover) moved Slashdot onto dual PII's, and the mighty growth of Slashcode ensued! That's about the time my own Multia started to overheat and require BLOWING INTO THE CASE before rebooting. I put Debian Ham on a K5, and moved my RISC fetish onto early UltraSparc and SGI R10000.
Who else originally found this place because they were looking for WindowMaker .10 -era related sites, and watched Rob's link collection grow?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
A new P4 2Ghz box has a different sort of appeal, compared to a PDP-11/40.
You don't run them because they're low power or because they're fast. It's the appeal of playing with what is now comparitively exotic hardware. You don't *need* to run new software on older machines. It'd be much more satisfying to get the aforementioned PDP-11 connected to the internet then a bright and shiny new computer. Particularly as I don't think there's an IP stack for RT-11.
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
No, but most Alphas can be flashed with new firmware, and enable you to use SRM (the Unix console) that way.
It's hard to say, without knowing exactly what Alpha you have (real DEC or or a whitebox, PC164LX/SX), how you could install Linux on it, but either an SRM firmware upgrade or install using MILO.
Best of luck with it, it can be quite fun.
/Styx
I know everyone's sick of hearing that the BSDs out-do Linux, but on non-intel hardware the situation is really quite exaggerated.
;-).
The Linux benefits of commercial software (Corel, Real, Sun) don't apply to non-x86 architectures, and the huge flock of Linux developers are working on the i386 development... The other platforms are a hacky afterthought. Meanwhile, the BSDs are no different from i386, to VAX, to Alpha, to Sparc, to MVE.
So does anyone have one good reason to run Linux on non-i386 hardware (not that the reasons to run it on x86 hardware are good)
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I have a DEC 3000/400 (no "station") that I got virtually for free a couple years back. I ran netbsd (which has much better hardware support on turbochannel machines than alpha linux, plus it's not linux ::ducks::) on it for a long time, it was a web, name, ftp server, you get the picture. 150 or more days uptime, only interrupted by power outages, and it ran in a closet so must have been at least 80 degrees F in there continuously. When I went to move it, I was puzzled at the sticky grey goo underneath the machine until I realized it had melted its plastic feet!
It's a great machine, incredibly reliable, unfortunately the days of these beasts being useful are past I think. It's just so cheap to get an x86 (or in my case an iBook with a dead screen) machine to replace them which is faster, cooler, more energy efficient, and quieter.
Of course the coolness factor of running this old workhorse still appeals to me, perhaps when I get a house with a basement (alleviating the noise and heat) I'll set it up once more.
As others have pointed out the 2.4 kernel series has been painful on alpha. This is symptomatic of the fact that the alpha/linux community has died, completely. The two big alpha sites, Alphalinux (referenced in the article), and Alpha News have disappeared. I've been checking almost daily for months. In the last few months I've had a very hard time finding packages. I installed redhat 4 years ago, after a painful wrestling with the pre-release debian of the day. Now redhat 7.2 for alpha is still not out yet, despite the fact that it's been out for i386 since the beginning of October. Redhat sees the writing on the wall too. Their rawhide likewise hasn't seen a new package in a good while. Now I wish I had tried harder with Debian.
I've always hand-installed a lot of packages, but lately, since I can't find binary updates to redhat at all, I've been compiling more and more by hand. And lots of them don't compile. 64-bit cleanness is not something most programmers do by default. (hint: do not use long unless you really know what you're doing!)
It is ironic that in this day where everyone is anticipating the next great 64-bit chip (x86-64/Itanic), I am contemplating moving back to the 32-bit world, after using 64 bits for 4 years, because maintaining it is becoming a chore. DEC/Compaq/HP has really shot themselves in the foot. Between all their mergers and questionable "roadmap", they've alienated their fans, supporters, customers, employees, and even the Hewlett family. Their engineers left for AMD (and you wondered why the K7 was so much faster than the K6 -- buy Athlons!) their compiler guys and patents left for Intel (boycott Intel!), and there's little left of the original vision.
So all you tinkerers out there, I encourage you to buy up all the surplus Miata's you can find! And help the plight of Linux/Alpha and 64-bit clean code across the OSS landscape! Because 64-bit processors are going to become more prevalent, not less, and the world needs people on 64-bit machines to test stuff! (only about 5% of the packages I run into don't compile and run out of the box on alpha/linux -- but those 5% need to be fixed!) And everyone buy a USB PCI card for it too, because the current USB drivers suck! They can hang my kernel.
Oh, and an alpha makes a great firewall/router since all the script-kiddie buffer overflow hacks don't work. (all the script kiddies use buffer overflow attacks that insert x86 code onto the stack...this obviously doesn't work on alpha) A little bit of security through obscurity can help. But don't neglect real security!
--Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
I've got a 533mhz 164SX that i got on ebay 2-3 years ago here ($250 for the board with cpu at the time). It works great and is a decent speed. (the noname 21064 that it replaced was painfully slow)
Another benefit of using anything other than x86 CPUs is that they are much less likely to be broken into as script kiddie exploits are more common for the lousy popular architecture. Now that there are decent open source web browsers available you can even use it as a desktop machine.
Warning-plug ahead
I am the adminof ACCRC and I thought a plug for the nonprofit I work at is appropriate here.
ACCRC refurbishes computers and donates them to worthy causes. All donated machines go out the door w/ Suse preinstalled and the retail box taped to the side.
Our charter allows us to accept any Technology as a donation. That which can not be placed w/ a worthy cause is used for cool projects in house.
(ie permanent magnet motors in huge old tape drives are being played with for windmill generator possibilities)
If you want to donate, volunteer, or just say "Hi", check out http://www.accrc.org/
END plug
ok
This place rocks I have alot of fun and get to save the world at the same time. 'nuff said
Cheers,
-chris
admin
slashdot reader
he who fears the 'effect'
Year Machine CPU CLOCK RAM UNIXBench Score
1992? PC 80486 66MHz 32MB 11.1
1995 Multia Alpha 21066A 166MHz 64MB 12.8
I upgrade my p75 to a netgear router, and my Ping went from 30ms to 10ms. I even tried that freesco floppy router, same thing.
People say that they make good routers, but I want the lowest ping for games. So maybe older machines might good firewalls, if you dont care about ping. Some good benchmarks on firewall/nat latency would be nice. Hell, I still got a sparc 20 that makes a good X terminal, but ill use machines built for low latency firewalls.
-
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. - Thomas Paine (1737 - 1809)
Although this one throws in a few SPARC and VAX machines...
0 49208
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/02/19/
And it seems the MIPS-based versions of the respective OSes are coming along; NetBSD will run on your O2. SGI's work on Linux for MIPS is as far as "only Indys have a working XFree86" although a few other machines will boot Linux.
An interesting question is what about the Cobalt MIPS-based appliances? Don't they run Linux as the x86 ones do? So where's the source code for those?
I've been a fan of the Alpha chip since its debut in the February, 1993 Communications of the ACM back in 1990. Alpha was the great hope, a new chip designed from the ground up as a scientific and technical powerhouse. I had read Darryll Strauss's great article about harnessing 166 433 MHz Alphas toward the production of Titanic, and that only whet my appetite further. When I read that Samsung was going to be pushing Alpha workstations, I exercised my most persuasive writing skills and requested a machine for development, with the idea that it might be used to further the use of Alphas in visual effects work.
:)
Shockingly, about three months later, a battered old SmartAlpha Station A10 showed up on my doorstep. I suppose you can tell a workstation from a desktop machine by the gauge of sheet metal, this thing weighs about 50 lbs. At the time I was still under the influence of NT, so I ported all of our code over to NT on the Alpha. It wasn't that hard, but it wasn't that rewarding either. The rest of our shop is SGI machines, and, well, NT isn't Unix.
Then I decided to run Linux on the box. I ordered Red Hat 5.2 from CheapBytes. 5.2 was the latest Red Hat release for Alpha at the time, although they were shipping 6.0 for X86 machines.
We ported all of our SGI software to the Alpha, and used it for a couple of movies, most noteably Woman on Top . We did some ray tracing using Larry Gritz's BMRT for some of the scenes in the movie, where the power of the Alpha was well used.
After that, I took the machine home, and used it as my home computer until I got a laptop -- and it's been off since then. As promised by the title, here are the lessons learned.
Pro:
Alphas are significantly more finicky about floating point exceptions than the other machines we were using at the time. We found a lot of bugs in our code due to the fact that applications would crash on the Alpha rather than just silently generating bad results.
There are many benefits to using multiple architectures when developing code. It keeps you much more honest. It forces you to keep your build trees in good shape.
Alpha is a 64-bit machine, and it was my first exposure to the fact that long != int. We'll all find this out eventually, sooner is better than later.
Cons:
Alphas are outcasts. That was true three years ago when we got the machine, and it has become dramatically more true now. Finding a decent web browser, for instance, was a challenge. In general, the avalanche of tools that makes Linux so pleasant and productive dries up to a trickle when you look for Alpha tools.
It's very common that programs that you download source for don't quite compile under Alpha. It's not really the fault of those programmers, of course -- they don't have Alpha machines, typically, to test the installation on.
Alphas are just expensive boxes. They will never compete on a MIPS/$ basis. This was true even when they were many times as fast as the Intel chips, and it's becoming more and more true.
Finally, persuing oddball architectures is just typically not a cost-productive way to spend one's time. Of course, I say that -- and I'd sooner die than ever use a Microsoft product
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I suppose most people don't know but FreeBSD on the Alpha works just fine. Have you tried looking into this?
The mirror at http://www.linuxalpha.org seems to be online.
And, RedHat, hasn't given on the Alpha yet, RedHat 7.2 *will* be comming out. They've done a deal with Compaq: see Phillip Copeland (Bryce)'s diary
But, you're right, more Alpha hackers are always welcome.
/Styx
Yes! You too can take a system that was once valued at more than $10,000 and place Debian Linux on it and make it into those dsl/cable routers you see in retail stores go for around $100!! Or even into a Linksys Gigadrive that goes for $700!!
It is a pitty to see such fine hardware depreciate in value faster than a Ford Pinto.
30% off web hosting. Coupon code "SLASHDOT".
This is a DECstation after recieving a nice beating and causing the cops to be called on me and a friend. Hopefully having this in comments won't get it slashdoted -- it's no longer on a university network...
There is this wonderful thing that people say when their package doesn't compile on another platform...
"But it works on my Pentium!"
So many apps out there are not 64 bit clean, and they will need to be in the not so far future. A hell of a lot of the Debian package people have been doing a brilliant job to make the packages available compile and work on 64 bit platforms. Bdale Garbee is probably the most well known identity working on this effort and has put a lot of effort into porting to Debian to new architectures.
Not all packages are destined to get ported to every architectures (eg: there is no sound device on an S/390, so no real need to have certain sound packages: But don't forget things like network sound architectures!), but most are, and a lot of it is developers who have no understanding of the issues caused by a 64 bit environment.
"But who cares about Alpha?"
If you think Alpha is the only platform that will benefit from 64 bit clean code, think again! There are a fair number of 64 bit platforms, like ia64 and PA-Risc. Fixing such problems will make such software work on all 64 bit platforms.
One last thing to note is that sometimes it's good to have a different perspective on things occasionly. Not everything revolves around the ia32 (i386, etc) platform like everyone generally seems to think.
Not that we have any Alphas to give away, but you can try out Debian running on a couple of Alphas in the Compaq Test Drive Program. We also have Red Hat, SuSE, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Tru64 Unix (formerly Digital Unix), and OpenVMS running on Alphas in the program, and though we cannot provide official support, we are always happy to respond to user questions and requests. Learn more about the Test Drive Program, see what we have running now, or sign up for an account.
I think what everyone wants to know is...
:)
Were you the one that got to edit the scenes with Penelope Cruz in the nude?
Seriously, I saw the movie while I was dating a Brazilian (her idea, not mine), and I don't remember any scenes in particular that would have required ray tracing. Can you specify the scenes?
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
I eventually went to NetBSD 1.5 and it booted up and worked fine. It's still alive.
I thought it would be fun, but was a bit dissapointed to discover that it was on the order of a tenth the speed of my Cyrix PR233 machine. I thought an Alpha at 150 could at least keep up with a ~180 MHz X86 processor, but NOOOOOOOO.
Oh, well. It still makes a good Postgresql server.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
So a Multia would make a very good Quake or QII server. The server doesn't need to do 3D graphics, it just needs to track the positions of all the players, rockets, etc. This is FPU-heavy, but the Alpha's FPU was always better than the Pentiums of the time. Although the integer processing wasn't much faster, an Alpha could smoke any Pentium at, e.g., rendering.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
-- Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
I have an old Multia, that I've been trying to resurrect with RH7.1, but everytime I do an install I get file system corruption (ext2) when I start doing anything serious.
I've tried swapping the memory with another machine (my SGI Indy) to no avail. I am wondering if perhaps the SCSI hard drive is dying, or if the machine is just dead.
I'd use Debian if this problem were a RHism, but I'm not going to pull down yet another ISO and waste an evening installing it if not.
Anybody else seen this sort of symptom?
www.eFax.com are spammers
Many of these cast-offs make great webservers, NAT routers, firewalls, DNS servers etc. (and can do all this stuff at once). You don't need vast amounts of computing power for a typical home/small office NAT router or webserver or firewall or DNS server. I'm not spending thousands on the latest Pentium-4 for my NAT router - I'd rather spend a few beans on a cast-off Sun or DEC machine which has some geek appeal precisely because it isn't the ubiquitous Wintel or Lintel system.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows