Suns are remarkably durable. I am a penetration tester and with established clientele it is not at all unusual for me to stumble upon a Sun that's been running nonstop for 20 years or more.
You need to get yourself an Ultra 80. They were the last bulletproof workstations that they made, with up to 4 CPUs and options for hardware 3D graphics.
@@hessex1899 Sunblade 1000 and 2000 were also good. I was using a Sunblade 2000 with xvr-1200 with 2 x 24" lcd's connected via dvi as late as 2013. I also worked at a powerstation that used sun boxes as scada systems. Those machines had a 10 year life.
It actually says that in the V120 manual, which I of course read after trying the MRV cable. I need to get some of those Cisco console cables... but in the meantime I'm gonna hook it up to that MRV which is also RJ45, so I'll just make an RJ45RJ45 crossover cable between the Sun Fire and the MRV.
What makes the SPARC processor unique is register windows and movnz SPARC V8+ instruction: the register windows provide 256 virtual registers (32 physical), and the movnz instruction will move data conditionally without having to take a branch and invalidate the instruction cache. Additionally, every branch not taken provides a free instruction slot within the same clock cycle. A coder who understands how these processors work can squeeze crazy amounts of performance out of SPARC CPU's.
I helped administrating a SUN E450 (4x400MHz CPUs, 2Gigs RAM) in my University 20 years ago. The fact that a raspberry pi would outperform that expensive beast now makes me a bit sad.
Do not use raspberry pi's they aren't reliable i bought best model and have a low voltage notification and then my hard drive with 20 years of data corrupted
Lol. Timing. I just resurrected my x1. Forget the noisy drives: netboot it!! I used openbsd, setup as diskless client over NFS. I *tried* some EIDE to sata converters, but, no go. I looked after a tonne of v100's, v210's, e450's, and a few e10ks, among others, in a past life. :-). Loved them. Sitting next to a sun engineer for two years was ace! :-).
Man early in my career I worked at a Fortune 500 company that had tons of SPARC hardware, like every model you could imagine. Solaris was an interesting OS to work with, zones were pretty cool though. The 600 0blade chassis were interesting, mixed x86 and SPARC blades.
That's awesome! It's amazing how many server variants Sun came out with over the years. I'm totally new to Solaris so I'm excited to mess around with it.
Wow this brings me back. I use to run my DNS server off one of these. I hated the chipset on these if was slow compared to the better sunfires. Edit: You should check out the T2+ based servers, I scrapped mine when debian dropped support for SPARC. These things were 10 years ahead of their time with 6 channel memory. (per processor). I tried to use one as a desktop with pci-express extenders but couldn't get a modern GPU to run right. (2020). The firmware file loading in would start the frame buffer then cause a kernel panic. The 3d relms card I had couldn't accelerate video so I scrapped the thing.
@@clabretro needs properly compiled code to be usable, as in: you better know which options to use with the Sun Studio compilers to get the performance.
I was super looking forward to this video because I have a v210 and v240. I've also got a couple of other xeon sun servers which I think you hinted that you got an x2250 in the one video. Love the content, keep it up!
Nice! those v240s look awesome, just need to find one for the right price. yeah got an x2200 which will start showing up in some videos. never messed around with solaris before so it'll be fun to get them working.
@@clabretro It would be interesting if you can find a Sunblade 2000 as those machines take fc-al drives instead of scsi. I still have a Blade 2000 and Ultra 80 in my collection but sadly they are on the other side of the world to me right now. Locally I just have a V210 and V120. Get involved and start testing Debian! It's still being worked on for Sparc!
About six years ago I got a Sun server at an auction just because I never worked with one before and I wanted see what it was like. After I got past the part of figuring out how to work with it without the VGA port I was so used to, I didn't really know what to do with it. I mean, it was old, slow, power hungry, and loud. So, It's now buried behind a bunch of stuff in a storage closet.
Nice! it's really close to the Sun Netra X1, I own one of those, had it as a main homelab server from 2005-2007 with Solaris 10. Very reliable system, but {slow, power hungy, noisy, limited} as hell. Great video!
Awesome! I would've loved having one of those back in 2005-2007. When I did research on this V120 it sounds like the Netras were a sister line meant more for telecommunications use, they were tougher machines rated to handle more physical abuse.
@@clabretro some netra's had AC power supplies allowing them to be installed in telcom system racks. Exactly the same chassis just different power supplies.
Funny to see the PGA370 socked. As you showed from start I wondered what kind of ZIF socket they use... so they just hitchhiked on the consumer intel parts, lol :D
I recently saw a Solaris 7 system - a V100 server with twenty one years (21) uptime in a regional office server room.... doing little else but passing traffic, I assume it was missed during network inventory, hiding away doing very little. Still we had the old 2000's (no VPN) default corporate office passwords for access.
I have a Sun Fire V880 that boots but has a lot of self-test issues. It’s massive. I am missing the case key and so I can’t do any service, which is all the same anyway because it’s so heavy I can’t get it out of the road case it’s in. Would love to explore it and maybe even get the original software (included in box) going.
Too bad i can't reply with a picture. I had a sunfire v890 and a v240 that we threw out last year. and they were still powered on until that day :) Was used in a call-center
I was actually expecting you to attempt an OpenBSD install. However, I was actually quite surprised to see Solaris is still being developed. Would it be possible to update the the lastest version?
Amazingly, it'll run Solaris 10: www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/hcl/data/sol/systems/views/all_servers_oracle_systems.page2.html No "official" support for 11 though: www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/hcl/data/s11ga/systems/views/oracle_systems_all_results.page1.html If the hard drive works I'll have to give those both a try anyway though. I'm new to the Solaris world, I need to play around with OpenBSD as well.
The UltraSPARC IIe is not what you want. The IIi is the workhorse of SPARC of that age. Runs through Solaris 11 just fine, before they dropped sun4u support...
Oh interesting! The Wikipedia page on the SPARC II is super misleading: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_II. Glad to know it's got a good processor in it.
@@clabretro Wikipedia is not exactly wrong it's sun's marketing that's weird. The cpu you have is a IIe+ but for some reason sun liked to call it a IIi even tho they already had a cpu named IIi from the previous generation.
@@clabretro Yeah, sorry, my mistake about the IIe+. I never had or worked with those particular models. My first SPARC server was a SPARCstation 4 that I got off a local Linux Users Group. I got it working, and practiced with Solaris 8. Then I got an Ultra 5, maxed out the CPU and memory, and beta tested Solaris 9 and 10 on it. I also had a Sun Fire V240, a 280R in the form of a Netra branded model, and haven't been able to afford one since. They are priced out of my budget now, but I still love the systems to DEATH. I really like the Solaris operating system, and am an active member of the Illumos community. I'd like to get a CoolThreads server (the Niagara UltraSPARC T1, T2 or T2 Plus) and run Solaris on it again!
6:00 I don't think the PGA Socket 370 (Intel) is mechanically compatible with this PGA 370 (USII) socket, if you compare the pin arrangement for the keying is different. See WMF Commons "Sun_UltraSPARC_IIe_back.jpg" and compare with "Pentium_iii_sl4cb_reverse.png" (no links because spam filtering). The UltraSPARC socket is also a few years older than the Intel socket.
Hey clab! I’m rewatching this video because I’m really interested in buying a V210 off eBay. Does $180 with shipping sound good? Or should I go for a V100 for like $100-140 (i found two listings for V100s.
hey there! well - beauty is of course in the eye of the beholder when it comes to these old enterprise server prices. for context I paid $120 shipped for my v240 (but I think I got lucky - that was a good deal - and one of the CPUs was bad and missing a heatsink). So after CPU and heatsink costs it's back up to the ~$180 range. I paid something like $130 for that v120. Personally, I'd go with the v210, I think you'll get more use out of it. the v120 and v100s are pretty underpowered, whereas my v240 can comfortably run Solaris 10 and anything I do with it. but either one would be fun, can't really go wrong!
@@clabretroUpdate: it arrived! I’m waiting on hard drives and drive trays though. LOM and OBP work, but I have noticed some odd behavior with the diagnostics. When I first tested it, I got some errors from VxDiag about the I2C bus, but it magically fixed itself. Unfortunately both CPU fans are bad so I’ll have to find some replacement 25mm fans. Thank you for making all of this amazing content on Sun stuff. Your videos on the Sun Ray got me hooked, and I guess it got the best of me lol.
Greetings and thanks for the video. I think that the substance on the back of the heat sink is indium. Look it up & check it out! I've never seen this on a commercial computer but I've used it in a scientific CCD camera with integrated TE Cooler. Sucking heat out of the cooler was paramount, so we used indium. High thermal conductivity, four times softer than lead and very conformal to make good thermal contact to both surfaces. Will not dry out. If you still have it, keep it, it's good stuff and not cheap!🖖
You might have spent half the money on a "Gateway" PC-bucket, but it wouldn't have anywhere near the lights out management (LOM) features that V120 "budget" server has. The very common mistake is presuming that the PC-bucket had any kind of feature parity with that entry level server; it does not.
hell Sir,can you discuss about Log In to Oracle ILOM ? what to do, how to access Log In to Oracle ILOM ?.I have problem with sunfire v 120 to access the lom console .Thank you!!!
I was able to reach it over the "A LOM" RJ45 port via serial with minicom on Linux, I suspect default Putty settings on Windows would work too. The trick is having the right cable, I made my own based on the pinout in the V120 manual, starting at page 83: docs.oracle.com/cd/E19088-01/v120.srvr/816-2090-10/816-2090-10.pdf. I believe a Cisco DB9/RJ45 console cable will work for this, but I haven't tried it myself!
Hi, Did you at one point manage to netboot your v120? I have a solaris 10 VM on my proxmox host set up to host a netboot server, but my v120 refuses all my attempts to get it to boot from it... is there any special trick to it that I'm missing? I can read from the tftp server and I can also mount the nfs share just fine but my v120 just throws this message at me: 3a000 Using BOOTP/DHCP... Bound: IP address is: 192.168.12.59 Found 192.168.12.1 @ mac address BOOOTP/DHCP configuration failed! panic - boot: could not mount filesystem. Program terminated
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Suns are remarkably durable. I am a penetration tester and with established clientele it is not at all unusual for me to stumble upon a Sun that's been running nonstop for 20 years or more.
You need to get yourself an Ultra 80. They were the last bulletproof workstations that they made, with up to 4 CPUs and options for hardware 3D graphics.
yeah I'm starting to think there are a lot of Suns still running out there. would love an Ultra 80, super awesome machines.
@@hessex1899 Sunblade 1000 and 2000 were also good. I was using a Sunblade 2000 with xvr-1200 with 2 x 24" lcd's connected via dvi as late as 2013. I also worked at a powerstation that used sun boxes as scada systems. Those machines had a 10 year life.
@@clabretro When will you get your first Alpha and Itanium machines? ;)
@@hessex1899 Desktop version of the E420R server. I ran an E220R for many, many years.
A Cisco console cable is perfectly fine for this.
It actually says that in the V120 manual, which I of course read after trying the MRV cable. I need to get some of those Cisco console cables... but in the meantime I'm gonna hook it up to that MRV which is also RJ45, so I'll just make an RJ45RJ45 crossover cable between the Sun Fire and the MRV.
What makes the SPARC processor unique is register windows and movnz SPARC V8+ instruction: the register windows provide 256 virtual registers (32 physical), and the movnz instruction will move data conditionally without having to take a branch and invalidate the instruction cache. Additionally, every branch not taken provides a free instruction slot within the same clock cycle. A coder who understands how these processors work can squeeze crazy amounts of performance out of SPARC CPU's.
I helped administrating a SUN E450 (4x400MHz CPUs, 2Gigs RAM) in my University 20 years ago. The fact that a raspberry pi would outperform that expensive beast now makes me a bit sad.
Nice! Yeah it's amazing how much things have changed.
Do not use raspberry pi's they aren't reliable i bought best model and have a low voltage notification and then my hard drive with 20 years of data corrupted
@@vanpeters9751 Thats so tragic :(
Lol. Timing. I just resurrected my x1. Forget the noisy drives: netboot it!! I used openbsd, setup as diskless client over NFS. I *tried* some EIDE to sata converters, but, no go. I looked after a tonne of v100's, v210's, e450's, and a few e10ks, among others, in a past life. :-). Loved them. Sitting next to a sun engineer for two years was ace! :-).
nice! I'll need to look into that diskless client approach.
Oh man, you got to play with the e10k? I heard that the cost to replace the midplane in that thing was the better part of a million dollars!
love too know how that system still reply to the promts when system is off , facinating
Man early in my career I worked at a Fortune 500 company that had tons of SPARC hardware, like every model you could imagine. Solaris was an interesting OS to work with, zones were pretty cool though. The 600 0blade chassis were interesting, mixed x86 and SPARC blades.
That's awesome! It's amazing how many server variants Sun came out with over the years. I'm totally new to Solaris so I'm excited to mess around with it.
I still use Zones! hell I just deployed a DNS server in a Zone running on OmniOS :))
@@AntranigVartanian yeah, zones are still way ahead of anything GNU / Linux has, even in 2024, and are still a thing to use. Fancy meeting you here!
Wow this brings me back. I use to run my DNS server off one of these. I hated the chipset on these if was slow compared to the better sunfires.
Edit: You should check out the T2+ based servers, I scrapped mine when debian dropped support for SPARC. These things were 10 years ahead of their time with 6 channel memory. (per processor). I tried to use one as a desktop with pci-express extenders but couldn't get a modern GPU to run right. (2020). The firmware file loading in would start the frame buffer then cause a kernel panic. The 3d relms card I had couldn't accelerate video so I scrapped the thing.
oh yeah, I like the v120 but it's definitely slow
@@clabretro needs properly compiled code to be usable, as in: you better know which options to use with the Sun Studio compilers to get the performance.
I was super looking forward to this video because I have a v210 and v240. I've also got a couple of other xeon sun servers which I think you hinted that you got an x2250 in the one video. Love the content, keep it up!
Nice! those v240s look awesome, just need to find one for the right price. yeah got an x2200 which will start showing up in some videos. never messed around with solaris before so it'll be fun to get them working.
@@clabretro It would be interesting if you can find a Sunblade 2000 as those machines take fc-al drives instead of scsi. I still have a Blade 2000 and Ultra 80 in my collection but sadly they are on the other side of the world to me right now. Locally I just have a V210 and V120. Get involved and start testing Debian! It's still being worked on for Sparc!
About six years ago I got a Sun server at an auction just because I never worked with one before and I wanted see what it was like. After I got past the part of figuring out how to work with it without the VGA port I was so used to, I didn't really know what to do with it. I mean, it was old, slow, power hungry, and loud. So, It's now buried behind a bunch of stuff in a storage closet.
Nice! it's really close to the Sun Netra X1, I own one of those, had it as a main homelab server from 2005-2007 with Solaris 10. Very reliable system, but {slow, power hungy, noisy, limited} as hell. Great video!
Awesome! I would've loved having one of those back in 2005-2007. When I did research on this V120 it sounds like the Netras were a sister line meant more for telecommunications use, they were tougher machines rated to handle more physical abuse.
@@clabretro some netra's had AC power supplies allowing them to be installed in telcom system racks. Exactly the same chassis just different power supplies.
these were nice little units had one of these and the raid array years ago
I believe that is a graphite pad on the back of the Heatsink. They were used in place of thermal paste because they don't dry out.
totally correct! it was pretty scratched up so I ended up replacing it with thermal compound and haven't had issues.
Funny to see the PGA370 socked. As you showed from start I wondered what kind of ZIF socket they use... so they just hitchhiked on the consumer intel parts, lol :D
I was stoked when I first got my X1
I recently saw a Solaris 7 system - a V100 server with twenty one years (21) uptime in a regional office server room.... doing little else but passing traffic, I assume it was missed during network inventory, hiding away doing very little. Still we had the old 2000's (no VPN) default corporate office passwords for access.
I have a Sun Fire V880 that boots but has a lot of self-test issues. It’s massive. I am missing the case key and so I can’t do any service, which is all the same anyway because it’s so heavy I can’t get it out of the road case it’s in. Would love to explore it and maybe even get the original software (included in box) going.
Those V880s are no joke! That'd be cool if you got it back to life.
Too bad i can't reply with a picture. I had a sunfire v890 and a v240 that we threw out last year. and they were still powered on until that day :) Was used in a call-center
ha that's amazing! makes me wonder how many of these old things are still in service. what kind of software was it running?
@@clabretro I believe it was used for Avaya CMS (telephony system)
Fascinating, looks like that's still sold. I bet there are plenty of old instances running out there still. Thanks for the info!
I was actually expecting you to attempt an OpenBSD install. However, I was actually quite surprised to see Solaris is still being developed. Would it be possible to update the the lastest version?
Amazingly, it'll run Solaris 10: www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/hcl/data/sol/systems/views/all_servers_oracle_systems.page2.html
No "official" support for 11 though: www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/hcl/data/s11ga/systems/views/oracle_systems_all_results.page1.html
If the hard drive works I'll have to give those both a try anyway though. I'm new to the Solaris world, I need to play around with OpenBSD as well.
@@clabretro thats super cool!
The UltraSPARC IIe is not what you want. The IIi is the workhorse of SPARC of that age. Runs through Solaris 11 just fine, before they dropped sun4u support...
Oh interesting! The Wikipedia page on the SPARC II is super misleading: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_II. Glad to know it's got a good processor in it.
@@clabretro Wikipedia is not exactly wrong it's sun's marketing that's weird. The cpu you have is a IIe+ but for some reason sun liked to call it a IIi even tho they already had a cpu named IIi from the previous generation.
Ah thank you! I was trying to figure that out.
@@clabretro Yeah, sorry, my mistake about the IIe+. I never had or worked with those particular models. My first SPARC server was a SPARCstation 4 that I got off a local Linux Users Group. I got it working, and practiced with Solaris 8. Then I got an Ultra 5, maxed out the CPU and memory, and beta tested Solaris 9 and 10 on it. I also had a Sun Fire V240, a 280R in the form of a Netra branded model, and haven't been able to afford one since. They are priced out of my budget now, but I still love the systems to DEATH. I really like the Solaris operating system, and am an active member of the Illumos community. I'd like to get a CoolThreads server (the Niagara UltraSPARC T1, T2 or T2 Plus) and run Solaris on it again!
@maverickbna very cool! love hearing all these stories about people's experiences with these Sun machines.
6:00 I don't think the PGA Socket 370 (Intel) is mechanically compatible with this PGA 370 (USII) socket, if you compare the pin arrangement for the keying is different. See WMF Commons "Sun_UltraSPARC_IIe_back.jpg" and compare with "Pentium_iii_sl4cb_reverse.png" (no links because spam filtering). The UltraSPARC socket is also a few years older than the Intel socket.
Oh thanks, I never actually went and looked that up.
Love old SPARC server d( ^ . ^ )b - Thanks for a film
Hey clab! I’m rewatching this video because I’m really interested in buying a V210 off eBay. Does $180 with shipping sound good? Or should I go for a V100 for like $100-140 (i found two listings for V100s.
hey there! well - beauty is of course in the eye of the beholder when it comes to these old enterprise server prices. for context I paid $120 shipped for my v240 (but I think I got lucky - that was a good deal - and one of the CPUs was bad and missing a heatsink). So after CPU and heatsink costs it's back up to the ~$180 range.
I paid something like $130 for that v120. Personally, I'd go with the v210, I think you'll get more use out of it. the v120 and v100s are pretty underpowered, whereas my v240 can comfortably run Solaris 10 and anything I do with it. but either one would be fun, can't really go wrong!
@@clabretroUpdate: it arrived! I’m waiting on hard drives and drive trays though. LOM and OBP work, but I have noticed some odd behavior with the diagnostics. When I first tested it, I got some errors from VxDiag about the I2C bus, but it magically fixed itself. Unfortunately both CPU fans are bad so I’ll have to find some replacement 25mm fans. Thank you for making all of this amazing content on Sun stuff. Your videos on the Sun Ray got me hooked, and I guess it got the best of me lol.
@@razzledev Mate you gotta document your build id love to watch
Greetings and thanks for the video. I think that the substance on the back of the heat sink is indium. Look it up & check it out!
I've never seen this on a commercial computer but I've used it in a scientific CCD camera with integrated TE Cooler. Sucking heat out of the cooler was paramount, so we used indium. High thermal conductivity, four times softer than lead and very conformal to make good thermal contact to both surfaces. Will not dry out. If you still have it, keep it, it's good stuff and not cheap!🖖
I left it on there! Not sure if it's indium but definitely some sort of thermal pad.
You might have spent half the money on a "Gateway" PC-bucket, but it wouldn't have anywhere near the lights out management (LOM) features that V120 "budget" server has. The very common mistake is presuming that the PC-bucket had any kind of feature parity with that entry level server; it does not.
hell Sir,can you discuss about Log In to Oracle ILOM ? what to do, how to access Log In to Oracle ILOM ?.I have problem with sunfire v 120 to access the lom console .Thank you!!!
I was able to reach it over the "A LOM" RJ45 port via serial with minicom on Linux, I suspect default Putty settings on Windows would work too. The trick is having the right cable, I made my own based on the pinout in the V120 manual, starting at page 83: docs.oracle.com/cd/E19088-01/v120.srvr/816-2090-10/816-2090-10.pdf. I believe a Cisco DB9/RJ45 console cable will work for this, but I haven't tried it myself!
@@clabretro Thank you very much for advice !!!! I spent many days research . but I didn't find anything useful!!!!!
Oh, new servers from sun came with a chocolate bar inside, can you guess why?
ha never heard that. how come?
@@clabretro so you read the manual before racking it up! :-).
You can add an xvr-100 video card to the v120...
i think it needs skibiddy toilet scard for inside scitting
sparc and powerpc, stabbed by arm
Is it official that oracle retired the sun production?
Well, the name for sure. Oracle still produces servers that you can probably trace back to the Sun acquisition.
Hi, do you have an email where I can reach you about some SUN hardware I may donate to you ?
Sure, I've added my email to the About section of the channel: www.youtube.com/@clabretro/about
Dont remember Sun doing anything budget.
I wonder if the company name "SUN" is an abbreviation for "Super UNix".
Was just looking this up recently, it's actually short for the "Stanford University Network," three of the founders met at Stanford.
technically Speaking that's not a Server but rather a 1U Blade in order for that to be a real server you need an Attached drive Array.
Hi,
Did you at one point manage to netboot your v120?
I have a solaris 10 VM on my proxmox host set up to host a netboot server, but my v120 refuses all my attempts to get it to boot from it...
is there any special trick to it that I'm missing?
I can read from the tftp server and I can also mount the nfs share just fine but my v120 just throws this message at me:
3a000 Using BOOTP/DHCP...
Bound: IP address is: 192.168.12.59
Found 192.168.12.1 @ mac address
BOOOTP/DHCP configuration failed!
panic - boot: could not mount filesystem.
Program terminated