Sun Sparc 5 Nostalgia

barl0w writes with what he calls "an awesome on-going story over at OS News about a Sun Sparc 5 coming alive again." Like the article's author points out, if you really want 64-bit computing, it's available cheaply on eBay.

Re:Again?

[the Man in Black]

Agreed. My most recent place of employment used one for primary DNS and DHCP. It ran Solaris 2.6, and in two years there I never had any problems with it.

Pizzaboxes may be ancient, but they get the job done. I wouldn't task one as a high-availability database server or anything like that, but if I have them, I'll use them. DNS, DHCP, firewall, log server, etc. etc.

Re:Correction

[ShaggyZet]

Sing it brother! As the proud owner of a sparc 2 (no, not an ultra 2) and a user of many sparc 5's and 20's I can say they are fine machines, even if they do run like molasses (ok, a faster 20 isn't *that* slow). The Ultra 5's and 10's are pieces of crap in comparison.

Ultra AXe is another decent choice

[Stonent1]

Basically an Ultra 5 built into an ATX motherboard. It makes it easy to toss together a system cheaply. I picked up the board for around $50 on ebay and the memory (256mb) for around $30 on ebay. Everything else was what I had laying around. Drop in a generic PCI USB/Firewire combo card and you've got most of the capabilities of a Sun Blade 100.

Sun NeXT

[Phrack]

Ah, the Sparc 5.. it ran NeXTSTEP real well. Better than Solaris, for that matter.

And no, I don't mean OpenSTEP.. google around, you'll find it.

My Ultra 5 story

[bongoras]

I bought an ultra 5 a few years ago used, and it sat running Solaris at my email server for my home domain. Then I got sick of Solaris, since it reminds me too much of my days working at Genuity. Talk about nightmares... everytime I sat down at the computer I felt my old PHB asking me for a status update and a team schedule and to update my bug reports.

So I wiped Solaris off it and starting fooling around with Debian Sparc. But it seemed... cheesy... just wrong. This is my personal box. Debian just seemed too easy. So I bit the bullet and put Gentoo for Sparc on it. Gentoo is PERFECT for reclaiming older hardware. A little reading of man gcc, some thought about my use flags... ( mine are: USE="apache2 imap maildir samba xml -arts -avi -encode -esd -gtk -gnome -imlib -kde -mad -mikmod -mpeg -oggvorbis -oss -opengl -qt -sdl -truetype -xv -xmms -motif")

And a FREAKING LONG TIME compiling everything... and I have the Unix box I've always wanted. Mine. No one else's. I mess with it, beat on it, do things do it I'd never do on a production system. It's totally fun, and Gentoo Linux on the Ultra 5 has given me a reborn enthusiasm for Linux and computers in general.

Sparc 5, feh!

[alamut]

i recently bought a sparc station 20 on ebay for $35 - including shipping!

it'll do just fine as a fileserver and entropy generator. and you cant beat the price.

nor can you beat the amusement of seeing what was left on the drives... mind boggling!

My SparcStation2 still kicking

[kindbud]

It runs RedHat 5.2... No, really! I still have the CD. I also have a CD for SunOS 4.1.4, which I might load on it again one day.

It ran Solaris2 like a pig, btw...

Two 50 Mb Quantum HDD, 64 Mb of 9-pin DRAM DIMMs in four banks of four... Ah, those were the days. (NOT!)

Ultra 5?

[BenjyD]

An Ultra 5 is retro? Worth getting nostalgic about? My main desktop at work was a SparcStation 5 until 18 months ago.

A friend uses a bunch of old sparcs to run his network - easier to use a load of small boxes than one big one. Pretty reliable too:
4:46pm up 454 day(s), 20:02, 1 user, load average: 0.11, 0.05, 0.03
4:48pm up 253 day(s), 47 min(s), 1 user, load average: 0.05, 0.03, 0.02
4:48pm up 454 days, 19:56, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Re:64 bit a marketing tool?

[sql*kitten]

64 bit gave higher precision for use on CAD workstations. Anyone who every used a Sun workstation for it's intended purpose would know this.

Oh yes, 64-bit has been not a luxury by a necessity in many industries for a decade now, anything that involves heavy number crunching - CAD, CAE, CFD, other forms of simulation, Monte Carlo runs in finance, physics models...

A while ago OSNews reviewed, IIRC, a new Sun workstation. The conclusion? It's crap because it's too hard to change the resolution or the colour scheme. Not one test they did was even remotely related to what a workstation is used for, they didn't even try compiling anything, let alone doing some MATLAB or solid modelling.

You can pretty much ignore any OSNews review of anything, in fact I've no idea why a discussion site (i.e. /.) even links to another discussion site as a story!

Re:Correction

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see what the big deal about this article is.

I =work= for Sun as a developer and my machine is an Ultra 5. There are a few other software developers here running Ultra 10s and one or two with an Ultra 60, but the majority of us are using Ultra 5s and 10s.

Re:You can purchase an Ultra 5...

[AKnightCowboy]

RTFA? The author says that the Ultra 5's are UDMA 33.

Go search for "sun ultra 5 udma" on Google Groups and read some of the usenet articles about pissed off users getting crappy performance if you don't believe me. I've got over a dozen Ultra 10's and one Ultra 5 (same thing as the Ultra 10 except it's a desktop case instead of a tower) and we've NEVER seen decent performance out of the disks. Just because Sun claims their controller chip is ultra-dma 33 doesn't mean their drivers actually take advantage of it.

The only udma 33 feature I've gotten out of them is supporting up to 112 gigs on a 120 gig ATA drive. This is all with Solaris obviously since you'd be insane to want to put Linux on these overpriced underperforming PC wannabes. The build quality on the cases reminds me of a cheap Taiwan import company. Remember though, this was their first take at the low-end cheap desktop computing market. We picked up our Ultra 10's for a very cheap $3600 each in 1999. They completely blew away the Ultra-2's we were previously buying for $16,000 each in terms of price/performance.

Re:Correction

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I laughed my ass off when I read the article. Sparc5 != Ultra 5.

Sparc5 vs. Ultra5

[BookRead]

SparcStation5 -- built like tank. 32 bits. SBUS cards.

SparcUltra5 -- built like cheap PC. 64 bits. PCI cards.

Used both, Used both as servers. Getting cards into the Sparc5 could be a real pain. But once in there they'd never give you any trouble. The Ultra5 struck me as a bit cheap, construction-wise. Which was a total 180 from their traditional "drop it on a concrete floor and the connectors stay stuck togeher. While Dells and such had snap-in parts the Ultra5 has little screws and sharp edges. Felt kind of loose.

Linux on a good PC pretty much killed my desire for Solaris. Never liked CDE, never like premium prices for simple add-ons like memory. Maybe useful for a special workstations but the Ultra5 was an attempt to steal into the PC market. I'm nostalgic for Sparc5 but not the Ultra5.

Re:Boring, not /. worthy article

[tomhudson]

quote from the story lead-in:

if you really want 64-bit computing, it's available cheaply on eBay.

quotoe from the story

... can find them on eBay for between $200.00 and $400.00

Or you can buy a new 64-bit motherboard and 64-bit cpu (athlon64) and for the same $400 bucks, and not have to worry about the lack of video cards (come on $400+ just for an 8-meg pci video card), special ram (doesn't take standard ram), other special hardware (non-standard keyboard, etc.).

These machines are being sold "cheaply" compared to their original cost, but they are no bargain. Give them to someone you don't like.

Re:Monitors on Sparc5

[Octorian]

That makes little sense, unless you didn't install a good framebuffer (graphics card) in the U10. The U5 only works with on-board or PCI framebuffers, while the U10 can take a UPA framebuffer (faster slot, think of it as "like" AGP for UltraSPARC). Of course the U5 and U10 technically use the same exact motherboard (with different PCI riser cards), but the U5's case isn't designed to let you install a UPA card.

Re:Correction

[funaho]

I was wondering when someone would notice that.

A regular Sparc 5 definitely *is* nostalgic. I have several old Sun machines at the house including a Sparc 5, Sparc 20 and an IPX (talk about nostalgia...those IPCs and IPXs are so cute :) )

I have a few old Ultras here at work (Ultra 1s mostly) and I do have Debian on them. Worst install I've ever done...the Sparc installer for Debian is *horrible*. And yes, I know it's beta at best, but still.

Re:Correction

[b1t r0t]

They used some sort of 5V DIMM memory. Ultra 5 memory is plug-compatible with the RAM used by old PowerMacs, but simply doesn't work in a PowerMac. I know because I bought some once, and ended up selling it for the same price to a hardcore Sun fan I knew.

Really, any 5V DIMM can be considered "proprietary memory", since the PC market didn't start using it until 3.3V RAM became the standard.