Step one in my loopy experiment to see if you happen to can flip a Solar SPARC server right into a workstation has been accomplished. Because of an extremely beneficiant donation by Jon Rushton, a reader from the UK, I’m now in possession of a SunFire V245 server (I did pay for transport, after all). The machine has some severe specs:
- Two UltraSPARC IIIi 1.5Ghz processors
- 8 GB of DDR1 RAM
- Two SAS arduous drives (73GB and 140GB)
- Solar Raptor GFX graphics card (to get replaced by a Solar Quadro FX 3450)
The machine has loads of room for growth, in addition to the standard server options like twin energy provides, tons and many followers that little question will likely be extremely loud, hot-swappable drive bays, distant administration ports, and so forth.
In Jon’s personal phrases: “What to say about me? I’m now the managing director of a monetary software program/providers agency, who’s been a pc nerd since childhood – I grew up with Atari 8-bit & Amigas, and they’re nonetheless a ardour – over the previous couple of years, caught the retrocomputing bug however for ‘huge iron’ techniques I used to lust after within the late 90s or work on in my job early 2000s. I’ve obtained quite a few Solar Extremely/Sparc techniques and SGI, HP PA-RISC, IBM iSeries, S/390 bits – in search of a DEC Alpha system for a few years to finish my RISC assortment! My high tip for these techniques is to take a look at IT Disposal corporations on eBay and so on, though machines have gotten more durable to search out there are nonetheless bargains available as corporations decommission early 2010’s gear.”
Since I’m nonetheless ready on a couple of extra equipment I wanted to buy in an effort to setup and use the server – a USB serial console cable and the aforementioned extra highly effective GPU – I can’t flip it on and use it fairly but. Whereas we wait on these equipment to be delivered, I figured I’d as properly publish a narrative within the meantime with a bunch of images of the server.
I’ve quite a lot of studying to do right here, for the reason that server world shouldn’t be a spot I’ve ever actually visited. I’m going to make stumbles alongside the best way, however the finish purpose is for this server to be a usable workstation – almost certainly working both Linux or BSD.
I can’t wait to get began.