The first step in my crazy experiment to see if you can turn a Sun SPARC server into a workstation has been completed. Thanks to an incredibly generous donation by Jon Rushton, a reader from the UK, I’m now in possession of a SunFire V245 server (I did pay for shipping, of course). The machine has some serious specifications:
- Two UltraSPARC IIIi 1.5Ghz processors
- 8 GB of DDR1 RAM
- Two SAS hard drives (73GB and 140GB)
- Sun Raptor GFX graphics card (to be replaced by a Sun Quadro FX 3450)
The machine has plenty of room for expansion, as well as the usual server features like dual power supplies, lots and lots of fans that no doubt will be incredibly loud, hot-swappable drive bays, remote management ports, and so on.
In Jon’s own words: “What to say about me? I’m now the managing director of a financial software/services firm, who’s been a computer nerd since childhood – I grew up with Atari 8-bit & Amigas, and they are still a passion – over the last few years, caught the retrocomputing bug but for ‘big iron’ systems I used to lust after in the late 90s or work on in my job early 2000s. I’ve got numerous Sun Ultra/Sparc systems and SGI, HP PA-RISC, IBM iSeries, S/390 bits – looking for a DEC Alpha system for many years to complete my RISC collection! My top tip for these systems is to look at IT Disposal companies on eBay etc, although machines are becoming harder to find there are still bargains to be had as companies decommission early 2010’s gear.”
Since I’m still waiting on a few more accessories I needed to purchase in order to setup and use the server – a USB serial console cable and the aforementioned more powerful GPU – I can’t turn it on and use it quite yet. While we wait on those accessories to be delivered, I figured I might as well post a story in the meantime with a bunch of photos of the server.
I have a lot of learning to do here, since the server world is not a place I have ever really visited. I’m going to make stumbles along the way, but the end goal is for this server to be a usable workstation – most likely running either Linux or BSD.
I can’t wait to get started.
I’ve never dealt with Sun hardware, so I too am curious about it.
Does this server have hardware raid?
Can we see some benchmarks…
lsusb -t
lspci -tv
lsscsi
iobench
sysbench
etc…
Assuming you get linux on there you could run windows on it under qemu, It would be a pointless but unique experience nevertheless 🙂
You could host something on the box if you wanted to, but on the other hand you probably don’t want to use your residential IP.
While I don’t know my way around spark hardware, you can email me if you have linux questions. I’d be happy to help.
Sun was very anti HW RAID.
The problem with the V245 and V215 (I think) was they were Sun’s first venture into PCI-E on the Sparc side, and they sort of left it for quite some time afterwards.
I’d be concerned about drivers for anything you plug into the PCI-e.
I had high hopes for Sun during Bechtolsheim’s return, but it simply didn’t happen.
Windows does not have a Sparc port. Qemu would need to do full x86_64 emulation. I don’t think it would be usable.
Besides, this is great hardware to run Solaris (or OpenIndiana or whichever fork is non=dead today). Linux won’t be so much fun.
zdzichu,
I actually ran windows on a sun workstation at uni under emulation to see if it worked. It wasn’t fast, but it wasn’t unusable. I could browse the file system and web ok.
Oracle obviously killed opensolaris, but the last version should work.
https://archiveos.org/opensolaris/
Does openindiana even work with sparc? I couldn’t find any information on sparc support.
Personally I’d give linux a try just for kicks, but you’re right it’s pretty niche and it looks like a lot of distros have dropped support over the years. But assuming you can still get the boot media for these, there’s a chance they’ll work 🙂
(sorry, I had to break some links to avoid wordpress quotas)
tldp.org/HOWTO/SPARC-HOWTO-12.html
fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/SPARC#Status
http://www.debian.org/ports/sparc/
If these benchmarks are to be believed, linux was faster than SunOS itself…
web.archive.org/web/20071029114805/http://www.ultralinux.org/faq.html#q_2_1
All of the BSDs list Thom’s server by name, which is encouraging..
http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/sparc/
http://www.openbsd.org/sparc64.html
wiki.netbsd.org/ports/sparc64/
Agreed – Solaris / osol will fly on this thing. Whenever I got my hands on Sun hardware, whether it was a SS5 or SS20 or V210/240 or Enterprise 4500, I never bothered with Linux. Those were the days of sfw and Blastwave – but now there’s OpenCSW, so I wouldn’t discount Solaris to do this beautiful machine some justice. Pro tips: if you ever get to installing classic Solaris (up to sol10 at least) over the network: a) it uses RARP to get an IP address, not DHCP and b) insists on classful networks, so will set up an /8 netmask for a 10.x subnet. …Which reminds me that I have a fairly unused T1000 gathering microdust on a shelf in my lab’s storage room. I’d love to bring it back to life sometime.
…FLEXlm licence server anybody? GCC is just not the same 😉
Any tips or hints regarding Solaris/OpenSolaris on a machine like this? It seems like the natural fit, but with Solaris 10 being quite outdated, a modern Linux or BSD might make more sense, since I see that OpenSolaris distributions generally do not support SPARC :/.
Yeah … don’t bother if you want to use it for anything useful.
Linux runs quite well on sparc4u.
OI, etc don’t have sparc builds available anymore, and frankly, other than curiosity, there really is no reason to run solaris.
My suggestion is that since you have the machine, it makes sense to try out a range of systems, starting with the easiest, and that’s going to be Solaris.
Solaris 10 should really “just work” once you have media. It’s certainly dated although note that since it had a very long lifetime it was continually refreshed with newer components, so a lot depends on the version you have. One of the nice perks of Solaris is it has good binary compatibility, which means it can run some old but amusing programs (looking at you, Internet Explorer for UNIX.) Unfortunately as far as I know the newest Firefox for Solaris 10 is quite old (52.0.2 or thereabouts.)
Linux is probably “next easiest” although note that for things like Firefox which have ISA dependencies it’s still not likely going to be close to current. Looking at Debian (which has a sparc64 ISO) it looks like they got to 62 or thereabouts.
Personally I’d try Gentoo since a) it’s fun and b) the hardware can do it, but note this really hits the “lack of web browser” problem. Gentoo removes build scripts for old versions fairly aggressively, and since no new version will work, the result is…no web browser at all.
Thom Holwerda,
I submitted another post but despite my efforts wordpress flagged it as spam.
From what I see I believe the last official version of opensolaris from sun did support SPARC,
https://archiveos.org/opensolaris/
I couldn’t find a current OpenIndiana for SPARC.
Personally I would try the SPARC64 port of debian, which lists your system under “Known Working”.
https://wiki.debian.org/Sparc64#Debian_Sparc64_port
All 3 BSDs list support as well.
I agree with malxau, start with the last official OpenSolaris as that was officially supported by Sun. But it will be too dated, so you might as well plan to try one of the more recent Linux and BSDs.
Solaris 10 will run on it. The OpenSolaris forks don’t tend to have good UltraSparc support.
In general, you get by far the best support from Solaris 10 and OpenBSD, kinda OK support in NetBSD, and then kinda crappy support from Linux and possibly OpenSXCE.
Software emulation is reasonably fast, even on a machine like this. You can do DOSBox on an UltraSparc III machine pretty comfortably, I’ve played SimCity and Daggerfall that way.
The most non-standard thing about running linux on sparc (other than some things being broken lol) is the firmware really.
Openfirmware is an acquired taste … and i’ve never really acquired the taste 😀
With it comes the disk partitioning (disklabels), part 3 always being the active one, etc. You only really have to deal with it once. Once you’ve set everything up (devices, variables, autoboot, etc), then it’s just … linux … with a whole lot less binary packages available.
At least grub2 works now, so you don’t have to deal with the insanity that is silo.
I presume there will be a need to re-apply heatsink compound to those processors, they will surely be dry and the risk of over-heating will be a problem if that isn’t addressed before any other work is done.
But be very lifting the heatsinks or it could be all over before it starts. Once you start needing to reflow solder on those old boards things can go downhill very quickly. It’s not that the components were difficult to solder when new, it’s that the materials in the actual circuit board degrade over time.
I’d also be checking electrolytic caps wherever they are easily accessibly, bad caps mean instability in supply voltages which can easily mimic software or driver problems.
Agreed with the general process, but this is a fairly modern piece from 2006-2008, I don’t think this is a case of reviving museum hardware – It could have been and probably was still running happily until it was sold off, so I don’t think the situation’s that bad. They just don’t make servers like they used to – yes, you can’t stop time, but SPARC boxes don’t die that easily.
Agree. However if I really wanted to measure the performance of that hardware in some new role, I’d have to deal with the issue of supply ripple first otherwise I’d be always left wondering what-if?
Welcome to the club 🙂
I have a V880 running debian, and a t5120 running gentoo. I used to have two t5120s, but one is now in the capable hands of a haiku dev
FWIW, you can use the ILOM port and ethernet to get to the console without serial. I don’t remember the details, but there’s a preconfigured IP and/or DHCP, then SSH or telnet to that IP and a default password.
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19203-01/819-1160-13/sp_initial_setup.html
Ah yes, “changeme”. We had a few of the other purple V models, and a few of of the T-series boxes that we started working on when Oracle decided that updates required service contracts and those never materialized from our corp procurement. Gave up and went Linux after a year or so.
MattPie,
Thanks for the link, I am very curious about the server’s remote access capabilities as well. Sometimes ethernet is the only way to administrate headless servers in the data center. But it needs to be enabled in the bios first. Unfortunately many x86 vendors like dell and HP have resorted to paywalls in current generation hardware to activate remote functionality. Even if you buy a used working server with all the hardware present, you’ll need to pay the original manufacturer to get in. We paid several hundred dollars on DRAC licensing just to enable second tier access. You can end up paying a huge percentage of the used server’s value to the manufacturer to use the hardware you already own (and was already paid by the original owner), it’s a total scam.
Completely O/T, but everyone needs to be aware that remote hardware feature activation is coming to a car near you…
https://www.thedrive.com/news/34547/bmw-is-planning-to-sell-heated-seats-and-more-as-a-subscription-no-really
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-3-rear-heated-seats-standard-range/
This is one of the unintended consequences of living in an always connected “Internet Of Things” world where owner control is overseen by another party. Now we all have to deal with this BS! This precedent is dangerous enough that I believe congress should intervene, but as we all know governments serve corporations. 🙁
I said this before, but I’ll say it again: You should use OpenBSD for the easiest experience. Linux on UltraSparc isn’t very well supported, things randomly don’t work, it takes weird extra steps to boot up, etc. OpenBSD became popular, in part, because of their support for Sun hardware during a time when Sun was making a lot of sysadmins unhappy. Their UltraSparc support really is top-notch, only Solaris 10 would be as good on a machine like this. And unlike OpenBSD, Solaris 10 won’t automatically boot with graphics card enabled, you have to start that via serial every time or fiddle with obscure OpenBoot settings.
FlyingJester,
I hear you, but what’s the harm in trying especially if someone else has already done it and documented it? IMHO it would be a missed opportunity to have the hardware and not see what is currently working on it.
Given a choice the first serious time I tried an alternative to Windows I ran Solaris not Linux. There’s a lot to like about Solaris. Then not long afterwards Oracle happened. Boo hiss. I gave up with Linux until Linux Mint came along. Since Vercrypt was dogmatic about TPM use and getting Windows and Linux to cooperate with full disk encryption was a pain I ditched Linux and went back to Windows.
Tom – thanks for the mention 🙂 as per malxau’s suggestion I’d look at Solaris in the first instance, you don’t need to run Solaris 10 – the V245 supports Solaris 11 https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/hcl/517090.html
The architecture of the machine is almost the same as the Sun Ultra 45; last (and greatest) SPARC workstation.