It’s time for an update on the OSNews Patreon, and the projects I’m working on as part of it.
Almost three weeks ago I wrote about the Sunfire V245 delivered to my door, ready to be turned into an entirely impractical and loud UltraSPARC workstation. Last we left off, I had just received the unit, and was waiting on a few additional parts to get going – most importantly, a USB serial cable – which were delivered shortly. Why, then, hasn’t there been another article or update, showing the big server running?
It turned out the machine wouldn’t boot properly. Together with John, the person who donated the machine to me, I’ve been trying to diagnose the problem, and after two weeks of troubleshooting, we seem to have isolated the probable cause of the problems. We think two replacement parts will address the problem, and John will be sending those over as soon as possible.
I’ve kept all the logs and information I noted down during the ongoing troubleshooting process, and rest assured, I will write a summary about our steps and processes, to give you a glimpse into diagnosing a hardy and annoying problem that seems to be a moving target, yet is probably caused by a very much fixed part of the machine.
Stay tuned!
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Moving on, I have two other Patreon projects planned. First, I accidentally ordered the wrong graphics cards for the SunFire V245 – they turned out to be incompatible, instead being designed for Sun’s AMD Opteron-based Ultra workstations. Since I’m now stuck with two identical Sun-branded NVIDIA Quadro workstation GPUs, I figured I might as well try and find a Sun Ultra 40 and see just how useful that beast of a workstation is in 2021.
Sadly, as with many pieces of more exotic hardware, they are hard to find in Europe, and affordable machines from the United States come with very hefty shipping costs. I’m hoping for some luck on the old world continent here.
Second, I intend to build a machine using nothing but parts from AliExpress. As most of you are probably aware, there’s a lively market of new Chinese-branded single and dual-socket Intel X79 and X99 motherboards on AliExpress. Countless other people on the web and YouTube have built machines around these motherboards, sporting used Xeon processors and RAM.
This has become a pretty popular and mostly reliable and trustworthy market on AliExpress, and I want to explore if it’s worth it to build such a machine for people like us here on OSNews. It’s fun, exotic, cheap, and possibly stupid, so why wouldn’t you want to see me try?
Please note that these plans are all subject to change, of course, and because they involve purchasing equipment from places like eBay and AliExpress, I cannot give any timelines or make any promises.
Thanks to all of our Patreons – 56 of them already! – for making these projects possible, and if you want to help, support OSNews and become an OSNews Patreon!
I know that companies in Europe that still rely on SPARC are hoarding the hardware to keep stock. That might be why little seems available in Europe. I would expect it to be easier with non-SPARC hardware though.
The original article, IIRC, mentioned a massive number of fans. I wonder just how overbuilt these systems were, given that they were intended for server configurations with high reliability. Are all of those fans, strictly speaking, necessary to prevent a meltdown. Or could some be safely removed or at least replaced with quieter fans?
Not sure there’s any way to find out without wrecking your new toy, though.
dan_sickles,
I’m not familiar with Thom’s server in particular, but in general you could replace them with quieter fan’s. For a lot of enterprise rack mount systems noise is a non-consideration during design.. Even if you run one at very cold temperatures when idle, the fans can still run like crazy because they have very high minimum speeds. You could probably retrofit your own fan controller system if you really felt the need to. I’d be wary of removing fans though because it would change the airflow.
Part of the problem is that the most effective way to reduce noise and fan count is to use larger fans, which are highly constrained for typical 1U and 2U rackmounts in particular. IMHO it’s better just not to get a rack mount if you want something quiet, haha.
Yeah I’m definitely going to look into fan control, but I doubt there’s going to be many non-hacky, supported solutions.
I don’t think you’ll find any “supported” solutions. But there’s a lot of ways you could go with DIY. Do sunfire servers use standard PC fan headers?
I’ve used fan controllers that fit a standard 5 1/4″ slot with manual dials, but you may not have a good way to mount those. If you don’t need to get to it from the outside, you could just get a buck converter to reduce the fan speed, but you wouldn’t have easy control over it when you close the case.
This isn’t really a recommendation, but I found this wifi boost/buck controller, haha.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/DC-Buck-Converter-8A-400W-Adjustable-Regulated-power-supply-Module-WIFF-APP/313320094520
Ideally you’d get a fan controller that has multiple probes and allows you to set temperature curves, but to be honest I can’t make a product recommendation because I always just use the BIOS for this. Anyone else here have experience…?
I’m always surprised by how much control Sun and Solaris give over the individual parts of the machine, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some sort of way to control the fans, either through Solaris, openboot, or ALOM.
Building a box out of AliExpress parts… The question isn’t why wouldn’t we want to see Thom try, it’s why would we? Like he said, countless others have already done it. I’m not sure what’s worse, the project itself or the pitch for it.
I think this whole project is a waste of time. It seems more of an ego jumping the gun thing than anything useful. I have nothing more to add so am otherwise ignoring the whole topic.
Hateful tone in this thread aside, that’s definitely a valid point. I was thinking of far more focus on platforms other sites and YouTubers would never consider, like Haiku or the BSDs, but hey, if nobody is interested in that, I’m not going to waste time on it.
There are obviously people who would pay to support this site even without any additional content, but right now this venture into Patreon seems a little bit mismanaged.
After three months of existence there are only two posts on Patreon and IIRC this update is also second of its kind here on OS News. And there’s nothing substantial to write about, only “hey, I bought the machine but got wrong spares, so now imma wait another couple of months for them to arrive”. Not very exciting.
Consider the following:
* Thom doesn’t make much, if any, money from OSNews
* OSNews is something he does on the side
* Thom is the only contributer to OSNews for the most part
This is fine.
As for the content, it’s part of the project, and it shows there are pitfalls to trying this.
Articles about running Haiku, Fuchsia, and OSes like that would be interesting.
The part about sourcing parts from AliExpress would probably be more frustrating then anything. Building a server/workstation with parts sourced from reputable vendors is tough enough. I’ve had $2K builds turn into $3K builds because of having to buy spares parts to troubleshoot problems.
Maybe something like a Solid Run Honeycomb based system is something to look at? https://shop.solid-run.com/product/SRLX216S00D00GE064H08CH/
Thom, imho, the absurdity of the SunFire V245 project IS its point of interest. It sounds like lots of fun! I’ve thought many times over of getting a SGI, Sun, or etc, “alternative” (non-x86/64) architecture system for the purpose of using it as a workstation. I currently have a 1U Dual Xeon server as a workstation, but I never did quite pull the trigger on going SPARC, what with the price/performance.
Slight change of subject: I recently sent a 20+ year old Dell Pentium Pro running the Intel version of Solaris 7 off to the recyclers. It was a fun old machine, but it was on its last legs. No one local wanted it. When I close my eyes and picture “Solaris,” I still see Solaris 7/8, running CDE.