Booting Sun Sparc Servers | Hacker News Reader

Booting Sun Sparc Servers

sidneys1.com

55 pointsrbanffy22 comments

I got to have this kind of fun a few years ago, when a company in our building threw away a Sun Ultra 45, which I believe was the last of the SPARC boxes packaged into a desktop form factor. These things were the stuff of legend - we had the later x86 Sun's in college - and I quite nearly blew a fuse after my coworker sent a photo of it in a dumpster, without telling me where it was until 30 minutes later.

By this point, Sun hardware was mostly PC-like: it took SATA hard drives, DDR memory, and USB peripherals. You didn't need to issue STOP to get to the `ok` prompt, you just had to do some specifically-timed dance with the (soft) power button.

My guess, based on the company throwing it out, is that they hit the power button, got a blinking red light with no video output, assumed it was dead, and tossed it. At this point, I didn't even know yet that there was an `ok` prompt to get to, and I spent a few hours at the office that night, wrapping my head around the service manual before getting it to dump me to `ok` and let me poke around.

I dreamt for years of restoring it and using it as a NAS (ZFS!), but life got in the way, and I eventually sold it (sufficiently refurbed to be running Solaris 10, but missing things like the side panels and drive cage) for only $250 or so.

I remember me and another guy at work bringing home a Solaris CD and trying to install it on our commodity hardware (we were both enamored by Unix and wanted to have access to it at home for programming and tinkering). As expected (not by us then though), it didn't install. Around the same time, magazines started including Linux CDs and I was able to get one of those going. But the credit for lighting the sparc still goes to Sun.

> 6-byte ethernet address (first three bytes should be 80:00:20).

I believe the first three bytes should be 08:00:20, since "08:00:20" is currently assigned to Oracle (who bought Sun in 2010), and "80:00:20" appears to be unassigned.

This is also visible in the photo just below "Sun SPARCstation 20", where it says:

    Ethernet address 8:0:20:c0:ff:ee, Host ID: 72c0ffee.

Despite the completely different architecture, it's interesting to note the similarities with a standard PC; I'm sure many others here have seen "CMOS checksum error" messages from the latter before. On the other hand, the most surprising difference is that the MAC address appears to be stored there too, along with other data like manufacturing date that I wouldn't expect to be in anything but a ROM or perhaps E(E)PROM.

I have a couple sun servers on my basement ... The fully-loaded Sun E450 will dim the lights when it's booted!

At one of my first jobs, we had a couple of E450s and E250s. We also has an E3500 which was enormous! I remember that machine taking a good 10 minutes to boot.

LOL. E3500 was small. Now the E10ks aka Starfire were sizable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Enterprise

I feel old.

Sun Fire 15ks too!

It’s all relative! I had an Ultra 10 on my desk.

Good old sparc. I wonder how many other engineers brought down production by closing their laptop lid in the datacenter while connected to the console port (which drops the server to ok) on the db server.

Unplug first!

> /etc/ethers

Since this uses NSS you're "supposed" to use `getent ethers` to read the file. But since there's no enumeration ...

To be pedantic, none of those machines are “servers”; they are all desktop machines.

In practice at the time I know we used Sparc 10 and Sparc 20 pizza boxes as servers. Until the various Ultras came out it was pretty common to see stacks of them running firewalls, dns (...and sometimes nis) or web servers next to the big iron running databases and such.

The 10 and 20 in particular had a much longer lifespan than a lot of folks realize. There were cheap (for the time) upgrades to put quad CPU's and a decent selection of SCSI HBA's, Ethernet NIC's and even some ATM interfaces. I know I still saw those units fairly commonly well into the mid 2000's.

Anything can be a server if it's set up to serve, so the distinction isn't useful here. Many people, educational organizations, companies, corporations, et cetera bought machines which have a desktop form factor which were used as servers.

Yes, but there was literally a parallel "SPARCserver" line of systems that were differentiated by lack of a graphics card and a server-oriented OS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation

That being said, most orgs had little reservations about putting workstations into server roles, including every company I worked for, such as a regional ISP.

Unlike prior Sun systems there was no rack-optimized direct counterpart to the SS20

the "SPARCServer 20" was a super rare badging for like, workgroup servers

the big rackmount units for the sun4m era were still VME systems: 4/670, 4/690, etc

Technically, yes. Though many early Internet providers used SparcStations and Ultras as "servers", generally either web servers or for shell accounts.

we (the ISP I worked for in the late 90's) used sparc 5 clones for desktops and mission critical things like DNS, sparc 10 and 20 clones for hosting and account management.

they were workhorses for what we tasked them to.

Similar, I assembled a system with a board/CPU purchased from Sun Microelectronics and we ran part of a small ISP on it for years on Solaris. We also put together a couple of DEC Alpha 21164's on the AlphaPC 164LX boards running Debian Linux. Those were fun times you could find some neat non-x86 stuff if you looked back in those days.

There was so much more variety in the 90's. At one company I worked for, we had Suns, SGIs, Alphas, HPs...

>To be pedantic, none of those machines are “servers”; they are all desktop machines.

not quibbling with your contribution, it's valuable. But if we're going to be more pedantic, a "server" is a piece of software, a single service running on a box and, in the realm of tcp/ip, listening to a port. I'm reading this on my X server.

had a lot of fun as a kid trying to figure out a working ram pair pattern among 16 RAM sticks to get a Sparc 2 "pizza box" to boot. After a couple of days, she booted! Rewarding.

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