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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 ?"
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.
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.
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.
and what's the comparison of power usage compared to your maxed out G4 and a consumer grade NAS?
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