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Sun Sparc 5 Nostalgia
barl0w writes with what he calls "an awesome on-going story over at OS News about a Sun Sparc 5 coming alive again." Like the article's author points out, if you really want 64-bit computing, it's available cheaply on eBay.
Agreed. My most recent place of employment used one for primary DNS and DHCP. It ran Solaris 2.6, and in two years there I never had any problems with it.
Pizzaboxes may be ancient, but they get the job done. I wouldn't task one as a high-availability database server or anything like that, but if I have them, I'll use them. DNS, DHCP, firewall, log server, etc. etc.
El riesgo vive siempre!
I bought an ultra 5 a few years ago used, and it sat running Solaris at my email server for my home domain. Then I got sick of Solaris, since it reminds me too much of my days working at Genuity. Talk about nightmares... everytime I sat down at the computer I felt my old PHB asking me for a status update and a team schedule and to update my bug reports.
So I wiped Solaris off it and starting fooling around with Debian Sparc. But it seemed... cheesy... just wrong. This is my personal box. Debian just seemed too easy. So I bit the bullet and put Gentoo for Sparc on it. Gentoo is PERFECT for reclaiming older hardware. A little reading of man gcc, some thought about my use flags... ( mine are: USE="apache2 imap maildir samba xml -arts -avi -encode -esd -gtk -gnome -imlib -kde -mad -mikmod -mpeg -oggvorbis -oss -opengl -qt -sdl -truetype -xv -xmms -motif")
And a FREAKING LONG TIME compiling everything... and I have the Unix box I've always wanted. Mine. No one else's. I mess with it, beat on it, do things do it I'd never do on a production system. It's totally fun, and Gentoo Linux on the Ultra 5 has given me a reborn enthusiasm for Linux and computers in general.
it'll do just fine as a fileserver and entropy generator. and you cant beat the price.
nor can you beat the amusement of seeing what was left on the drives... mind boggling!
It runs RedHat 5.2... No, really! I still have the CD. I also have a CD for SunOS 4.1.4, which I might load on it again one day.
It ran Solaris2 like a pig, btw...
Two 50 Mb Quantum HDD, 64 Mb of 9-pin DRAM DIMMs in four banks of four... Ah, those were the days. (NOT!)
Edith Keeler Must Die
64 bit gave higher precision for use on CAD workstations. Anyone who every used a Sun workstation for it's intended purpose would know this.
/.) even links to another discussion site as a story!
Oh yes, 64-bit has been not a luxury by a necessity in many industries for a decade now, anything that involves heavy number crunching - CAD, CAE, CFD, other forms of simulation, Monte Carlo runs in finance, physics models...
A while ago OSNews reviewed, IIRC, a new Sun workstation. The conclusion? It's crap because it's too hard to change the resolution or the colour scheme. Not one test they did was even remotely related to what a workstation is used for, they didn't even try compiling anything, let alone doing some MATLAB or solid modelling.
You can pretty much ignore any OSNews review of anything, in fact I've no idea why a discussion site (i.e.
I don't see what the big deal about this article is.
I =work= for Sun as a developer and my machine is an Ultra 5. There are a few other software developers here running Ultra 10s and one or two with an Ultra 60, but the majority of us are using Ultra 5s and 10s.
Go search for "sun ultra 5 udma" on Google Groups and read some of the usenet articles about pissed off users getting crappy performance if you don't believe me. I've got over a dozen Ultra 10's and one Ultra 5 (same thing as the Ultra 10 except it's a desktop case instead of a tower) and we've NEVER seen decent performance out of the disks. Just because Sun claims their controller chip is ultra-dma 33 doesn't mean their drivers actually take advantage of it.
The only udma 33 feature I've gotten out of them is supporting up to 112 gigs on a 120 gig ATA drive. This is all with Solaris obviously since you'd be insane to want to put Linux on these overpriced underperforming PC wannabes. The build quality on the cases reminds me of a cheap Taiwan import company. Remember though, this was their first take at the low-end cheap desktop computing market. We picked up our Ultra 10's for a very cheap $3600 each in 1999. They completely blew away the Ultra-2's we were previously buying for $16,000 each in terms of price/performance.
I was wondering when someone would notice that.
:) )
A regular Sparc 5 definitely *is* nostalgic. I have several old Sun machines at the house including a Sparc 5, Sparc 20 and an IPX (talk about nostalgia...those IPCs and IPXs are so cute
I have a few old Ultras here at work (Ultra 1s mostly) and I do have Debian on them. Worst install I've ever done...the Sparc installer for Debian is *horrible*. And yes, I know it's beta at best, but still.