Can my SPARC server host a website? | Hacker News Reader

Can my SPARC server host a website?

rup12.net

60 pointse145bc455f155 comments

27 years ago my job was hosting hundreds of websites (CBS News, among them) on Sun hardware just like that. It baffles me that anyone would consider this a question at all.

Agreed. The Netscape IPO was over 30 years ago. What do people think the web was running on back then?

And why do you think that machine is called a Netra?

> And why do you think that machine is called a Netra?

Netras were designed for telco use so not for any obvious reason as you suggest. It was available with -48V power supplies.

Were those websites supporting SSL connections, much less TLS 1.2? That would be my question on hardware that old. (In this case, it looks like they offload TLS to Cloudflare, so the machine itself isn't doing any encryption/decryption.)

He offloads TLS to the Proxmox server within their home network. TLS is used between that server and Cloudflare to keep everything safe during transport.

Recent OpenBSD should be able to do modern TLS, and probably ACME, which would have been more interesting.

The question is more about the hardware. Back then, TLS existed but was used sparingly for things like banking, because of the computational overhead, at both the server and client end. Today's computers are so much faster that we don't even think about it.

AES-GCM would be very slow on such an old computer, without hardware instructions for AES and for CLMUL.

However, this is precisely the reason why TLS also has the option to use ChaCha20-Poly1305, which will have a decent speed even on an ancient SPARC CPU, though on the most recent CPUs it cannot match the throughput of AES-GCM, which is preferred on these.

So if you want to use a SPARC with TLS 1.3, you must configure it to avoid AES-GCM and use only ChaCha20-Poly1305.

Yes, already back most people would not be putting their credit card details just like that.

Typically, fun memory they'd move to a secure connection for credit card input, but most of the site would be open HTTP - why secure what isn't confidential? Concerns about 3rd parties eavesdropping on the sites you visited weren't a big thing at the turn of the century.

Same here, I was more of a big iron UNIX guy on those days, the Linux server we had at the office was for hosting MP3 files and as Quake server for the occasional LAN parties.

Aix, HP-UX and Solaris, alongside Windows NT/2000 were our production server operating systems.

> It baffles me that anyone would consider this a question at all.

Thank you for saying this. I read this article a few days ago and felt the same: it's a 64-bit gigahertz-class RISC purporse designed internet server with a gig of RAM, running a current OS released less than 4 months ago.

OF COURSE it can host a website. A hundred active ones at once, I should think.

Interesting it is running OpenBSD 7.8.

These old SPARCs are beloved by their developers for their ability to uncover obscure low-level bugs due to the platform's strictness.

Everyone else has adequately pointed out SPARC boxes basically ran the Internet back in the day. It wasn't uncommon to have a single box hosting an entire university department: email, web serving, application server, login shell, etc.

It’s also Theo’s favourite architecture, afaik he was mostly working on SPARC back on NetBSD before the fork. I’d expect it to well supported for a while longer, even if practically no one else uses it.

Calling strict alignment requirements "beloved" is a wide stretch. You had to split loops into Sparc and Ubsan, vs normal variants.

As other say, what a strange question.

The whole dot.com boom when every company on earth scrambled to host their website... pretty much all of them on Sun hardware. Thus the insane run up of SUNW share price prior to the bust.

Of course, and it works well too. When I moved houses from solar wind to solar + mains I switched my e450 off, this is only 4 years ago; it works fine. I love that machine ; it looks the part and it's indestructible. My company in the early 2000s was running on sparcstation 5s, a lot of them (they were giving them away by that time); I have them all in my garage and they all work still.

> Network isolation: The Cloudflare tunnel creates an outbound-only connection, so no inbound ports are exposed on my home network

While inbound ports are not exposed you're still responding to incoming traffic so theoretically if someone can find a zero day in httpd nothing is anymore "network isolated" then if you had port 80 exposed to the world.

I do enjoy this, but the title is such clickbait. I was running websites on a sparc 2 back in 1995.

Slightly off topic, but: is it just me or does it become uninteresting to read things like this when the whole process is basically “so then I asked Claude this, and then I asked it this, and then this…”

I guess it takes away the intrigue of the project because anyone could do this (ask ai), and the only thing human left about it is the creativity of the idea itself. There’s not much merit to the effort.

Edit: nothing against the author or anything, it’s fun to do projects like this.

But I always kinda likened AI output to your kids’ artwork - to you it’s the best. To someone else, it doesn’t have as much impact.

its incredibly uninteresting and marks the perfect point to close the tab and go back to something enriching

I agree. I thought this was really interesting until I got to the point of them needing to fire up an assistant to write basic Apache config - ok fine maybe they were just introducing the assistant - but the next paragraph they were talking about using multiple agents for this despite not knowing why. I gave up at that point, it's not even slightly interesting for me

Someone got a website to be served from some airbuds so a Sparc server, which is literally where we served websites from in the 90s, should be pretty easy

Author here: Thank you for posting this link! And I see the sentiment: "Of course it can, it was built for that"! And I fully agree! My clickbaity title was meant to be in the spirit of 2026. Exposing an older server (although not an old OS) to the internet and all it's nasties was not something I would lightly do. But this old Netra does a good job! I guess the Cloudflare tunnel is a bit of cheating here, but I did not feel comfortable exposing something running at home. So CF came in clutch.

As for the hardware, yeah 1GB of RAM on a 2001 server, kits it out nicely! But even with that, I tried to limit what is running there so the server would actually work smoothly. (I even compiled a few Rust binaries, and yeah that took ages).

My old hardware collection has plenty of other candidates for hosting a website. So expect more!

> Memory: 56MiB / 1024MiB

This is the beefiest SPARC I have ever seen. Very cool this is running. Getting this set up is no easy feat if you haven't tried before. Props to OP

> This is the beefiest SPARC I have ever seen

My sarcasm detector came defective from the factory, and I've always struggled with getting it to work effectively.

So, if you aren't being sarcastic: 20 years ago, place I worked had a Sun Fire 15K. They supported max 576GB of RAM. Don't remember how much ours had, it probably wasn't a maxxed out config, but I'm sure it was a lot more than 1GB. The machine cost over $1 million dollars.

I only ever played with a sparcstation 5, and mine had a whopping 128MB and felt like room to spare.

Cloudflare Tunnels are awesome, dude. My blog is hosted on one and it's great how much you can configure on top of Cloudflare. I'm like the biggest enthusiast based on their feature set and how much they make free. Easy to convert me when I get to try even putting personal websites on their authentication flow.

Uhh, Yes? It is literally probably what this machine was doing in 2001.

(Source: guy who hosted websites on sparc's in 1995)

I remember SPARC being the mainstay of webhosting. It seems weird for this question to be posed.

UltraSparc smoked Intel at web server response times because it could handle so many more threads for Apache.

They even made CPU with a uarch specifically for webservers in the mid 2000s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1 The VHDL was later published under the GPL.

I don't think it's necessarily a dumb question; yes SPARC machines were used all over the web in the 90's and 2000's, but the web has changed a lot in the last twenty years. If nothing else, I could see not being able to find a recent-enough TLS package being an issue.

I realize that reading through the article that they did get OpenBSD working on there and yeah if you can get a modern OS on there it will probably work fine, but I don't think the core question of "Can my SPARC server host a website?" is dumb.

> I don't think it's necessarily a dumb question

It's not a dumb question, but OP didn't answer it. Cloudflare is fronting the website. So we don't know if the server is handling the entire traffic, nor if it's using TLS between it and Cloudflare.

This is what websites ran on back in 2001! It doesn't seem like much of a stretch to host a website on one, especially one that resembles a 2001-era site.

Somewhat sad OP is using cloud flare. If it was 2001 you'd just have it with some basic firewall appliance in-front of it.

The decentralisation of the Internet continues unfortunately

You mean the centralization.

Oh yeah, of course, thanks

Doesn't Solaris still live on as the illumos distributions? Tribblix still has SPARC64 builds.

First Solaris still lives on as Solaris, it was the very first UNIX to have hardware memory tagging to tame C.

And yes, there are a couple of distributions based on OpenSolaris, one of them powers Oxide infrastructure.

Yes, though some modern frameworks etc may struggle with the resources on an older machine.

That loaded faster than most pages I visit.

Also, excellent use of the marquee tag.

yes indeed, not everything needs a hyper-scale cluster and k8s and cloudflare etc !

Yes.

Now imagine a beowolf cluster of these.

it can but if it gets too much traffic it might sparc

I’m starting to get tired of these old hardware or minimally powered hardware hosting website posts. It’s not that novel anymore.

You're welcome to not read, but as someone who grew up in a certain era, it's pretty cool to see the old things. The webpage he's serving reminds me of all sorts of early internet things, where the knowledge was real and we were just pushing it onto this new thing. The actual site: https://sparc.rup12.net/ has a vibe similar to https://johnlind.tripod.com/, which is incredible. The knowledge is timeless.

> Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or higher

I feel young again...

It’s more subtle to me: I’ll never say no to retrocomputing (especially what you need to open yourself to the public internet without getting pwned), but “use a low end VPN and save $$$$!” is a bit old now.

The question as posed in the title is novel because it violates Betteridge's law of headlines:

> "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

I'd rather see stuff like this than an LLM spicy take on the front page. JMO, YMMV.

Why would anyone not think a Sparc server could host a web site?

An old IBM PC or even a Commodore 64 can host a web site. I think there’s a few online. I’ve seen them before.

I’ve seen a lot of younger “cloud native” age developers who have these insane distorted ideas about how much power is needed to do simple things. You’d be shocked at how much traffic a modern mid range laptop can handle with efficient software. The Ethernet card you can plug into it would probably be the bottleneck, since I’m not sure if they make USB-C cards faster than 5gbps.

A mid range laptop will also handle hundreds of gigs in a SQL database just fine.

If the mid range laptop happens to have a Thunderbolt/USB4 port there are a number of Thunderbolt adapters built around Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx SFP28 NICs.

I do not mind retro computing stuff. The most interesting part was installing up-to-date OpenBSD. But of course it can serve a static website.

Would have loved to see how it holds up with some load via FastCGI and CGI (via slowcgi(8)), since httpd(8) can be used with both of them.

At least it's not some, "AI makes me feel like a kid again" jagoff.

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