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 ?"

Comments

I must be getting old

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't seem too long ago 8 Ultrasparcs and 12GB of RAM was the shit. It must really hurt to pull that invoice from 2005 out...

Re:I must be getting old

[rudy_wayne]

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?

Re:I must be getting old

[TWX]

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.

Re:I must be getting old

[CapeBretonBarbarian]

There is a port of open source Illumos / Opendiana that should work on this hardware :

http://opensxce.org

Solaris 11 will not work on this hardware, but sxce should work.

Re:I must be getting old

[somenickname]

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.

Re:I must be getting old

[red crab]

I concur, this machine isn't old at all by Slashdot Unix Graybeard Users standards. What should i call my HP-UX PA-RISC B2000 workstation after reading this story; manufactured somewhere around BC?

Re:I must be getting old

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I must be getting old

[Rockoon]

I've got post-it notes on my desk older than this thing.

Still havent called mom.

Re:I must be getting old

[Trouvist]

I've got post-it notes on my desk older than this thing. Still havent called mom.

But isn't she just upstairs?

Re:I must be getting old

[mwvdlee]

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.

Re:I must be getting old

[White Flame]

This is the real problem with old hardware like that.

In contrast, many retro home computers take very little power. A Commodore 64 with an old inefficient linear regulator based power supply still only drew up to 15W from the wall.

Re:I must be getting old

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran a Sun Sparc 2 until 2007. Had it loaded up with 96 MB of memory. I was using it as a DNS and qmail server. It was running fine when I took it down. I just didn't want to support a 16 year old machine.

I still run a 40 year old Linn LP-12 belt-drive turntable. Not because it's "vintage". No. I run it because it's a damn good turntable and you can't buy anything better today without paying $2000 or more.

Re:I must be getting old

[CAIMLAS]

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.)

Re:I must be getting old

[Nossie]

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

Re:I must be getting old

[Bert64]

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.

Re:I must be getting old

[unixisc]

Thanks for pointing this out. So, of the various options that would be there among the Unixes:

1. System V: OpenSXCE
2. Linux: Debian & Gentoo (sadly, Red Hat & others have dropped support for it)
3. BSD: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD (I wonder whether something like DragonFly BSD would run on this?)

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.

Re:I must be getting old

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:I must be getting old

[funkboy]

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

Re:I must be getting old

[TWX]

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.

Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a recycling center, and we sell some of our stuff we get on ebay, got a few smaller sunfires in, Debian works GREAT on SPARC machines, its still active, and everything works OOB

Hmm.

[smegfault]

All maxed out it might just be able to run the newest Ubuntu.

Free software.

[Anonymous Coward]

Many free software projects are not regularly tested on anything other than x86.
Make your system available for free software developers and you will be sure to have
the loag average of 30 or more. Ghostscript project, for instance, would greatly benefit
from testing on minority platforms.

Re:Keep it Vintage

[mcmonkey]

This thing ain't vintage. It's just old.

Hang on to it for 10 years. Then it might be vintage.

OS?

[CapeBretonBarbarian]

For OS I personally would stay in the Solaris realm. I'd try out the the open source Ilumos/Opendiana based distribution that Martin Bochnig has been working on :

http://opensxce.org

Speaking of labours of love, Martin's one man effort to port the open source fork of Solaris back to the SPARC platform would be a good fit.

Re:Keep it Vintage

[TWX]

Like a classic car it's more interesting if it is vintage.

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.

Re:seconed debian

[Anonymous Sniper]

as an ex field engineer, I suspect you are confused... the sides of these were solid sheet-metal, with front-to-rear ventilation.

Needs lots of power

[hawguy]

Hope you don't pay much for your electricity, fully populated and busy, that server is going to draw around 3000W of power.

With that power draw, if you're paying $0.12/KWh for electricity, it would cost around $250/month to keep it powered, not including cooling costs.

Re:North Korea just set off a nuke

[93 Escort Wagon]

That wasn't a nuke being set off - it was just vikingpower turning that V1280 on.

can you please donate it to GNU compile farm

[decora]

they will stick Debian on it and people will use it to port free software.

they do have a sunfire but it's almost out of disk space and there are tons of people using it already.

Dusting off?

[HockeyPuck]

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.

Re:seconed debian

[puregen1us]

At the moment we're fighting to remove all the legacy Sun systems from our datacenters, and love the chance to remove these old machines.

They're rock solid, and do a great job. Our databases still run very very well on them, frequently more stabily than newer X86 kit they're being replaced with.

However:

1) Power usage is insane. The datacenter team reported the larger boxes (ie, 12U type beasts like this) use the same power as whole racks of the standard IBM/HP type pizza boxes we can replace them with. Modern Xeons are multi-cored/multi-threaded enough to compete seriously with the older SPARCs, and do a good job of it, without needing their own power station too fuel and cool them.

2) Parts are getting harder to find, and vastly more expensive. As they age the cost of supporting them sky-rockets, and with parts being harder to find if something breaks there is downtime to fix it. That's not a good situation to be in. Indivual parts for these old machines (eg. spare HBA card, etc) are now becoming as expensive as a new replacement system.

Re:Still more efficient than the x86 architecture

[blang]

I think you're forgetting how little computing power you're getting out of the sparc processors.
And the risc pipeline being highly optimized doesn't do you any good when you get 10x the speed out of a $50 intel chip.
Sparc was better in 1995.
By 1997 it was already playing catchup to everythnig else.

Antique?

[asaul]

We still have a V1280 in production (despite my best efforts to get rid of it), in fact I am sure we have an E3000 and some E450s somewhere in the place that somehow runs part of the network in a way no-one understands.

No emotional connection

[Weaselmancer]

I own some old stuff. An Amiga 2000, a C64, an Apple IIe, a Macintosh se/30. I maintain them because they were a part of my childhood. I have an emotional connection to these machines. Someday (I am watching) I will buy the digital microvax my old university used for their comp labs if I can. Loved that box. Spent days on it. I'll own an original Defender cabinet someday too.

I guess what I'm trying to say is why? You have no connection to this machine. You won't get nostalgic when you see it boot. Why bother?

Re:Keep it Vintage

[Lord Kano]

I'm into vintage firearms. I can't tell you how many times I've seen an old WWII or WWI vintage rifle that's worth next to nothing because some Bubba went and fucked it up. Guns that would be worth a lot of money if they were un-messed with are only worth a couple hundred dollars. I assume it's the same with most classic car collectors.

LK

gradual phase-out

[mcrbids]

When you run into this situation, the trick is to understand what the server actually does for end users and the answer is largely non-deterministic. So what you do is you write a network of cron jobs that take it "offline" for an hour a day, where that hour advances throughout the day.

After a week, increase the hour to 2 hours, and so on. If anybody is actually using said server, the complaints will shortly come out and you can then do a needs assessment.

When you get somewhere past 6/5 (6 hours per day, 5 days per week) you are pretty much ready to shut it down. And when you shut it down, keep it on hand "dark" for at least a year just in case.

Lastly, UPDATE YOUR FRIGGEN ADMIN LOGS because stuff like this is really a sign of gross incompetence at updating the logs.

Re:Keep it Vintage

[maz2331]

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.

Ha uhm.... what kind of company is this?

[decora]

If you work at a financial institituion, this is the kind of s**** that will lose millions of dollars.

There are a lot of things that only come up quarterly, or yearly, and things where the effects wont be known until months or years later.

so if someone does task X on February 15 but it doesnt show on a report until July, and then you shut it off on Feb 16th, that means it will be over a year before anyone finds out.

Let it go...

[techsoldaten]

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.

quarterly and annual recurring runs

[girlinatrainingbra]

mod parent up! Nobody considers the problem of quarterly and annual recurring data batch runs!!! You would be totally screwed up expecting your server to be available an d it turns out to be down just because someone monitored it over a 6-8 week period which just happened to miss the beginning or end of the quarterly reports, eh?