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

[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

[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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.