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Of the Love of Oldtimers - Dusting Off a Sun Fire V1280 Server
vikingpower writes "Today, I decided to acquire a refurbished Sun Fire V1280 server, with 8 CPUs. The machine will soon or may already belong to a certain history of computing. This project is not about high-performance computing, much more about lovingly dusting off and maintaining a piece of hardware considered quirky by 2013 standards. And Now the question creeps to mind: what software would Slashdotters run on such a beast, once it is upgraded to 12 procs and, say, 24 GiB of RAM ?"
Obviously you don't want to be running Solaris because Oracle owns Solaris and you won't be able to get any patches - even security related - in any sort of reasonable time frame, if at all, for free.
So it would seem then you're down to a free unix. You might like to try the *BSD platform but it is unclear how well any of these will run on that. Linux, maybe?
Why not just use it as a space heater?
Or better yet, empty it out of all of the cards and use it as a wine rack?
Yeah, I know, that's not what you wanted to do but your problem is that Oracle has seriously made it unworthwhile to own SPARC or UltraSPARC hardware.
WTF?
"The Sun Fire server brand was a series of server computers introduced in 2001".
You think something from 2001 is old? What are you? 12?
Heh. My desktop PC is dual 3.2GHz Xeon based on an ASUS PC-DL Deluxe board from ten years ago. It's the most stable computer I've ever owned, even though it spends most of its time booted into Windows XP rather than Linux, and its hardware suspend mode means that when I'm not using it it's not consuming gobs of power.
The only thing that would prevent me from using a Sun like the submitter describes would be the power requirements. I probably wouldn't use the computer to its extent that justifies the power costs to run it.
The computer I'm typing this on is a Dell Latitude D410, which is eight years old. It's normally the shop computer, but works just fine for general computing. It's a lot faster than the much newer netbook, and the keyboard is loads better.
I guess I've graduated from newest/latest/greatest to just wanting computers that do what I want them to do. I get a lot of gear from local surplus dealers, as I don't feel a need to spend more money than I have to for a given result. If the Core2Duo HP in the entertainment center runs XBMC at full 1080p then it's adequate and won't be changed out until it's no longer good enough.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I can tell that you aren't into cars.
The people we bought the house from have a Studebaker Avanti with a Chevy 350 in it.
Neighbors next door have a Chevy 350 in one of their vintage Jaguars.
A friend of mine has a Dodge Dart with a Magnum 5.9L V8 with full computer control and EFI.
I have a '78 Chrysler Cordoba that's getting a bored-and-stroked 408 small block.
Some people only value stock restorations, but a lot of us place a lot of value on restomods.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
as an ex field engineer, I suspect you are confused... the sides of these were solid sheet-metal, with front-to-rear ventilation.
Yeesh, and here I thought you'd have found a Sparc Center 2000 or other old sun boxes. Perhaps something that ran SunOS and not Solaris... or something newer with SBUS like an e4500...
It's not old if it has multiple cores.
It may not be that old but, it's definitely of nostalgic value for a lot of people. 12 cores isn't mindblowing these days but, in 2001, cramming 12 processors (not 12 cores) into a single rack mountable computer was a very impressive feat. I worked at Sun in the late 90s and I'd love to own some brand new gear from that era because, in those days, Sun was doing really impressive things with hardware in an exciting time. It's like wanting to own a muscle car. It's probably not that fast, it handles like garbage, it uses too much gas, etc. But, damn, it's cool.
The only thing that would prevent me from using a Sun like the submitter describes would be the power requirements. I probably wouldn't use the computer to its extent that justifies the power costs to run it.
This is the real problem with old hardware like that. In the not so distant past we had a wall of obsolete HPUX workstations, which while being decent at number crunching, were simply outclassed by new Intel machines (literally it was a wall - 3high by many wide, they stack well). I considered ways of converting them into some kind of compute farm, but they simply weren't worth the air conditioning or power required to run them (not to mention space). Power efficiency has so vastly improved in recent years that for compute tasks it just isn't worth it to keep old hardware like that running.
Anybody still running a WinXP computer (I still have one) is running older stuff than this server.
This V1280 should still make an excellent webserver by today's standards. Heck, it should still be superior to a lot of current hardware.
Also, I don't quite see what's quirky about it. It's basically low-end Sun hardware without anything particularly special about it. If anything, it's the least special of all Sun hardware since it lacks the special features of it's more expensive cousins.
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Firearms collectors value true originality above all else, and car collectors generally value condition and are okay with restorations and even some modernizations. It's just a different domain.
Indeed. We just got a chassis of roughly the same footprint for a customer; there is 524GB of RAM available per "blade", of which there are 6.
Honestly, I have a hard time seeing this as that old. It wasn't that long ago that 2GB of RAM was still considered a huge amount for a common server, either - not anything you'd see in a large budget environment, but certainly commonplace.
Personally, I've got equipment predating this millennium which is not only still plugged in and powered, but in actual regular use and continues to do its job just fine. The power bill from it is not as bad as one might think. And I'm not -that- old. 2001 certainly doesn't seem like something for an 'oldtimer', not unless you were already past mid-career at the time... we sysadmins have a pretty decent shelf life, vs. a programmer.
Kids these days...
(The pre-millennium system in question is a ULV-style 733MHz P3 Cely with 512MB of RAM and an 80GB IDE drive - a Compaq iPAQ desktop, a last ditch effort to remain relevant by Compaq. In all honesty, it was a good and under-appreciated effort. It's been running Debian since 2000, uninterrupted but upgraded to the latest without issues. It uses 36 watts of power under load (markedly less than a 2nd gen Atom or a Bobcat, I might add), has a parallel port and a real serial port with good port timing. It is more responsive over SSH and for basic home server silliness than either the Bobcat or Atom as well.)
A decade is a long time in computing, yes; but the modern systems we run are, in many ways, an exercise in self-perpetuation. (If it wasn't for the exponential RAM capacity we've run into along side CPU capability, there's absolutely no way we'd be offshoring half of what we are to India. Our systems wouldn't be able to run their shit code.)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Yeah, the server may be impressive by some people's standards, but it's going to be outclassed by newer / faster machines. Just don't get too attached.
The school my daughter attended got rid of a bunch of old 486s in 2001, which I brought home to build a beowulf cluster. Networked 32 of the things into a single, massive computer with all this computing power... it was the most exciting thing I had done in a while.
It was fascinating thinking I could do such a thing, but there were all these issues: fuses started blowing / the air was so dry my lips were chapping / the power bill went up by 400 dollars that month / hardware would mysteriously die and screw up the whole cluster / there was no software support / it took up an entire room in the house / my dog kept peeing on the machines at the bottom / etc.
Still, I was able to turn it into the world's most computationally expensive, clunky web server. It was outstanding for local development, but it was impossible to get it to work with the router for external network access.
It was hard to get rid of it, the machines were in my house for 2 years until I decided to move and had to leave them behind. It's so easy to get attached to obsolete machinery because of that personal connection to it.
Seriously, give your wife a safe word for when it's time to break ties with the thing. Ultimately, it is cool, but it's either going to become an unhealthy obsession or a thing on your shelf.
and what's the comparison of power usage compared to your maxed out G4 and a consumer grade NAS?
Those powermac G4 actually support 2gb of ram (4x 512mb), the official spec says 1.5 because that's all OS9 could use and in those days not many people would actually have that much.
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Thanks for pointing this out. So, of the various options that would be there among the Unixes:
But this looks like a cool setup. Just put one of the above OSs listed, and that thing can run for life, no need to bother about whether it will be supported in future or not. Also, if one is nostalgic about a past FOSS Unix, one can install any of the former distro versions that existed for it - from Red Hat going all the way back to Caldera. Although I'm not sure about the SMP support of some of them.
15W is still quite a lot, for what it does. A vaguely modern mobile phone or even something like a Raspberry Pi can emulate a C64 with under 1W of power draw, and will have HDMI so you can drive a TFT without having to power an ADC to generate the digital picture.
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A really good reason to run OpenBSD on sparc64 hardware is that the logical domain support is stable now, so you can use the processor's built-in virtualization framework: http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20121214153413
Bear in mind the cost to obtain as well.
It's the same argument made for fuel efficiency in an existing vehicle versus purchasing a new vehicle. If your existing paid-for vehicle gets 15mpg and a new vehicle with 30mpg will result in a $500/month car payment for five years, you're probably better off driving the 15mpg vehicle until it wears out. Not only will you not be spending $500/month minus half the cost of the fuel you buy (for me that would be around $100, so $400 difference) but as technology progresses, vehicles only get more and more efficient.
Same argument for computers. Run it until it doesn't do what you need anymore, either through significant mechanical breakage (admittedly unlikely in a computer outside of capacitor problems) or because new needs can't be met by it. Then make an intelligent change.
I have an Opteron board sitting in a bag. Odds are good that I won't end up using it, but that's okay. I don't need it right now, as much fun as it would be to put into something.
Obviously if one can get newer used gear cheap that does help to negate the argument, but a lot of people don't want to try used gear for whatever reason.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.