Sourcing SPARC / Power servers?

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ThatPrettyFreya

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#317380 10-Oct-2024 20:14

Hiya, like the title says, anyone know where a basically broke girl can source SPARC-based (preferably capable of running Solaris 11) or Power*-based (AIX 7.x) servers for experimentation and learning in the Wellington area? We had a real hard time finding them in chch, kinda hoping that WLG will have some officer somewhere with an old dusty Sun box kicking around or what have you. Not sure if this is the right place to ask this but we're gonna do it anyway and see what results.

Edit, 001537 Pacific Time Thu 10-OCT-24: typo

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#3295724 10-Oct-2024 20:57

As an (former) engineer who worked on and with Solaris/Sparc; is there any particular reason you want Sparc hardware specifically? The Solaris 11 x86 version, which you can run on any x86/VM is functionally identical, more or less apart from the boot loader.

Having said that, I also have some contacts I can ask about hardware; I'll let you know (may take a few days)

ThatPrettyFreya

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#3295726 10-Oct-2024 21:05

@jamesrt
It's kind of implementation-specific, but SPARC boxen (like every non-i86pc box we've ever owned) make serial console a first-class interaction method. We're blind, so the PC firmware relying on VGA (or one of its friends) as the primary console is kind of a killer. We have a Blade 150 running Solaris 10u11, and that's cute, but we're actually looking at working on packaging modern tools for older Solarisen and their offshoots. It's all well and good to have $YOUR_FAVOURITE_PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE for X64, but gods, it's a sad, sad world when x64 eats the entire universe. The Blade 150's 650MHz SUNW,UltraSPARC-IIe is.... kind of painful to compile things on and we wouldn't trust the IDE drives in this thing as far as we could throw it. Same goes for AIX/Power - we're actually running AIX 7.2 in a cross-architecture powerpc64 VM on an X64 box and it just seems like a really pretty OS with a lot of cool things to learn and explore; kind of reminds us of when we were learning Linux as a kid. Now we find Linux kinda boring, we want to start exploring real Unixen.

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ThatPrettyFreya

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#3295730 10-Oct-2024 21:12

@@jamesrt

Then again we're the kind of girl who likes HP-UX and OpenVMS, so perhaps we just have no standards whatsoever, we dunno.

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jamesrt

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#3295732 10-Oct-2024 21:19

Hey @ThatPrettyFreya; fair point around the serial console; hence my question on the use-case.

You may know a lot of the older hardware isn't supported by Solaris 11 - sun4u architecture isn't supported and won't run S11; so that's going to potentially limit options. However, given that sun4v has been around for ages - for example T-series 5120 came out in 2007 - (ugh - apparently I'm old!).

Good luck with the hunt - the sun4v gear is really nicely multithreaded and should still perform very well. I've reached out to a contact, so will let you know if I hear anything.

---

I have used Vax/VMS, AIX, and HP-UX in my previous jobs; they're all respectable OSes that have pretty much fallen on the wayside of history... (Maybe for good reasons!)

ThatPrettyFreya

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#3295736 10-Oct-2024 21:32

@jamesrt
Usecase is mostly exploring. Yeah, Solaris 11 and SUN4U aren't friends, though that's not to say sunos5.11 and SUN4U aren't; Tribblix being what it is. Issue is, Tribblix doesn't like IPS, and we rather do. SVR4 packaging is terrible horrible no good very bad and it died for a reason, and every time we see it we're just reminded of the horror of trying to get SUNWspro to run on a SPARC 32-bit Solaris 9 9/05 VM. Pain. Pain and sadness. Gods now we feel old, the T5120 is *that* old? Jesus H on a stick... Anyyway, yeah, a T5120/5220 would be proper shiny. Someone had an M3000 we think but that was mega dead; the XSCF just would *not* boot, no u-boot output on the serial console, no lights, no fans, no nothing. Far as we know, if the XSCF spits the dummy on an M3000 you are SOL; that thing just will never ever super ever boot ever again. AIX is our second favourite Unix behind Solaris, we'd love to get more time on HP-UX but the only HP-UX we can get right now is B11.11 9000/778 on an emulated BL180 in qemu. So slow, and also, ancient. Not a good combo. With DNF and some friendly taps with an IBM MRS-shaped hammer, we actually got a decently modern toolset on the virtualised AIX box, though it is *still* painfully slow, it being cross-arch emulation. VMS.... VMS is just goddamn weird, not helped by all the licensing stupidity around it, *Open*VMS yeah sure we'll believe that when we see it... anyway, now we're old lady rambling at this point, so we'll shut up and let you get back to whatever you're doing, something probably more interesting than watching a 24-year-old blind girl demonstrate that she has absolutely no life whatsoever and is throwing herself into things that people twice her age left far, far behind lol.

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ThatPrettyFreya

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#3298163 16-Oct-2024 17:56

heya @jamesrt,

End up hearing back from $CONTACTS about SPARC/power boxen? Currently it looks like something like a T5220 would be ideal, assuming we can quieten the fans from their no doubt initially jet aircraft levels of noisy?

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jamesrt

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#3298167 16-Oct-2024 18:20

@ThatPrettyFreya; sorry, haven't heard anything. I'll follow up, however!

ThatPrettyFreya

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#3298169 16-Oct-2024 18:21

@jamesrt

Sounds good. Very much need a project, heh

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jamesrt

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#3300703 23-Oct-2024 20:48

@ThatPrettyFreya; very sorry, have heard back from final (3rd) contact (turns out they were out of the country for a bit hence the delay); sadly, none of them have anything they could supply, or indeed much of a suggestion beyond trying Remarkit - which is where their previous excess kit had been sent.

Sorry this didn't wind up being helpful.

neb

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#3301232 24-Oct-2024 22:21

ThatPrettyFreya: Hiya, like the title says, anyone know where a basically broke girl can source SPARC-based (preferably capable of running Solaris 11) or Power*-based (AIX 7.x) servers for experimentation and learning in the Wellington area?

For Solaris, try the Solaris build farm. For Power, Solaris, HP-PA, RiscV, Loongson, etc, the cfarm compile farm. The cfarm shares some machines with the Solaris one so you can also get access to them via the cfarm route.

ThatPrettyFreya

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#3301237 24-Oct-2024 22:34

@neb

Oh that might work. The latency on those boxen is going to be.... painful though, something screenreaders generally disagree with. Nothing like having a machine running in your apartment to cut down on ssh latency lol

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neb

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#3301244 24-Oct-2024 22:52

They've got pretty good connectivity, never noticed any real problems. The only real issue is that the older machines are pretty slow, so the limiting factor is the response time of the hardware, not network bandwidth/latency.

The other nice thing is that they're maintained by volunteers, so you're not nursing a pile of cantankerous ageing hardware along. I maintain a pile of embedded devices as test platforms and I'm pretty sure I spend more time keeping them running than actually using them.

ThatPrettyFreya

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#3301245 24-Oct-2024 22:54

@neb

Screenreaders are spicily latency-sensitive, even 50ms can cause weird cursor tracking issues in the terminal. Heh, our oldest bit of kit is Iris, our Sun Blade 150, and she has been, without question, our most reliable server in our entire network. Bloody love this machine, and if she's anything like newer SPARC boxen, we might end up replacing all our gear with SPARC stuff if we can bloody manage it.

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ThatPrettyFreya

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#3302923 29-Oct-2024 21:55

update on this: It appears that this country has somewhat of a blank space in its memory, between about 1991 and 2014. Computers before that era are labeled "vintage", and thus people have them. Computers after that era are labeled "modern", and so people have them. We have called everyone you can bloody think of, we even tried U Vic, and we have been met with nothing other than a collectively mastered effort to fail to understand even remotely what we speak of. We have a theory that if it does not involve Windows, Linux, Devops, containerisation, docker, or client-level IT trashware (I.E your i86pc and/or ARM boxen that you shovel out to the folks in the office), this country has embarked on a near perfect quest to forget it ever existed. When, indeed, these people are confronted with something, such as a Sun SPARC T4-1 that breaks this deliberate blissful ignorance, they send it to be DISMANTLED, lest this country, lest the IT world at all, remember that perhaps x86 and ARM are not the be all and end all. Perhaps RISC-V is a second-rate opensource ISA, one that brutally murdered OpenSPARC, then pissed on its corpse, and walked in as if it was, indeed, the first opensource ISA. A recycler had some Sun Blade 150 workstations.... it is likely we have one of the very bloody workstations that were in that lot. Is there, truly and honestly, not a single Sun SPARC Enterprize T5220, or Sun Fire V240, or Enterprize M3000, anywhere in this country? Not a single one?

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ThatPrettyFreya

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#3302928 29-Oct-2024 22:02

oh also:

@jamesrt

Remarkit gave us the general vibe of not wanting anything to do with us, we got fobbed off to the "yeah send us an email..." pathway, which never ends well. Tried a few other places, the moment we mentioned SPARC it's like the contents of their brains suddenly leaked out their ears.

@neb

We got access to cfarm, but the vibe we got from the folks on the mailing list was "unless you actually have something productive to do, go away". Considering we're still experimenting, and we don't have root on those boxes.... yeah, that'd not going to work

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