unsigned long geek = random();

A few weeks ago I collected some more Sun hardware from a friend of mine who seems to know the location of the best dumpsters in town. It was quite a collection: a pair of Ultra 60s, a Ultra 2, a pair of Ultra 1s, a Sun 8mm tape drive and a StorEdge L280 DLT changer.

One of the Ultra 60s had a single 360Mhz CPU, 1GiB RAM, a 9GiB disk, gigabit Ethernet and a pair of Creator3Ds. The other had a single 360Mhz CPU, 512MiB RAM, a pair of 18GiB drives and a single Creator3D. The Ultra 2 only had a single 200Mhz CPU, but had 512MiB RAM. The Ultra 1s were pretty low end – both had 143Mhz CPUs, 64MiB RAM and a quad fast ethernet and one had a 2GiB disk, the other being diskless.

I’ve given the one Ultra 60 and the Ultra 2 to Jonathan Groll and the Ultra 1s will probably be given to some deserving homes amongst CLUG members. My Ultra 60 is already running NetBSD-current (currently 4.99.4 kernel and userland) and working well, but more on that in a later post.

It’s incredible, but a few years ago it was impossible to get any moderately decent Sun hardware locally, but these days it seems to be falling from the sky. At rough count I currently have 13 unused Sun machines (6×32-bit, 7×64-bit). Now I just need to get myself a nice Blade 1000, 2000 or 2500 and I’ll be a very happy camper. Of course NetBSD still needs to get working sparc64 SMP and UltraSPARC-III CPU support, but that’s minor stuff

On Sunday I finally managed to get OpenSolaris installed on my “spare” Sun Ultra 2. Finally for a number of reasons:

• It took me a while to get the machine back together again with a working disk and the correct RAM. 200-pin DSIMMs are not the easiest things to add and remove.
• I have a distinct shortage of decent sized 1″ SCA disks. I eventually found a 7,200rpm 9GiB Western Digital drive that used to be in my AlphaServer 800 and used that.
• I needed to update the PROM to boot a 64-bit kernel, which took some time as I had to hunt down a hard disk with Solaris already installed in order to boot the PROM updater.
• Solaris is not quick to install using a 12x CD-ROM drive (the fastest I had at hand – didn’t feel like digging in the parts bin outside for a faster one).
• Slicing the disk incorrectly is not a Good Thing – the first install failed after /usr ran out of space.

After all that:
[1] mj@skunkworks:~$ uname -a
SunOS skunkworks 5.11 snv_52 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2


Not the fastest machine (single 300Mhz UltraSPARC-II CPU, 512MiB RAM), but it runs well.

On Saturday I got two Sun UltraSPARC systems from a friend, in exchange for my unused SGI O2. Although the O2 was a great little machine, I hadn’t used it for about a year and SGI’s poor support for IRIX (ie no easy way for me to get patches) meant it would probably have languished in my pile of unused systems for a while longer.

The two systems I got were an Ultra 10, 333Mhz, 256MiB, 9GiB IDE, Creator3D and an Ultra 2, 300Mhz, 256MiB, Creator3D and no disks. I’ve already stripped my Ultra 5 and put its RAM, SCSI controller, disk and USB 2.0 card into the Ultra 10 and it seems noticeably faster – probably a combination of the Creator3D and the extra cache on the 333Mhz CPU (2MiB vs the 256KiB on the Ultra 5′s 360Mhz).

The Ultra 10 is running NetBSD-current (4.99.1) and once Solaris 10 Update 3 has been released, I’ll be installing it on the Ultra 2.

Yep, it’s true – it takes longer to build Firefox 2.0 than it does to build 1.5. Timings on a 500Mhz EV56 AlphaServer 800 running NetBSD:
real 612m43.097s
user 534m11.005s
sys 80m52.159s

Contrast those with my previous results and you’ll see that it takes about 4 minutes longer to build 2.0. It’s bloat I tell you

Last week my proxy server, a Sun Ultra 2 running NetBSD 3.0_STABLE, started powering itself off. Every time I powered the machine on again, after about an hour (just after resynchronising the RAID), it would power off again. There were no messages on the serial console, which was rather puzzling.

Some judicious Googling suggested that it could be a heat problem, so on the weekend I stripped the machine down and cleaned it out. It was full of dust – a thick layer on the power supply and over the CPUs’ heat sinks. After the cleanout, the machine has been rock solid – I’ve rebuilt a lot of pkgsrc packages and put it under a fair load and it hasn’t skipped a beat.

Saw this mail on the FreeBSD alpha list a few days ago – unfortunately it seems as if support for the Alpha architecture will be phased out with FreeBSD 7.0.

From John Baldwin:
Alpha was the first non-x86 port that was added to FreeBSD, and as such it has greatly aided the efforts to keep FreeBSD from being too i386-centric. However, recently the Alpha port has not had any active development or maintenance.
...
After considering all of this, it is time to part with Alpha for 7.0 and beyond. At this time it is still planned to provide 6.x releases for FreeBSD/alpha. The code will still be around in CVS history if someone suddenly shows up and fixes a bunch of bugs and/or the architecture is revived. ...

I certainly hope someone steps up to take care of FreeBSD/alpha, as it would be sad to see it consigned to the history books. I’ve never used FreeBSD/alpha seriously (my Alphas run NetBSD), but the more choice there is available in the open source arena the better.

Spotted today that sgi have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It’s sad that the once great maker of high-end graphics workstations has been reduced to this, but I can’t help but feel the writing was on the wall once they diverted from their core competency with products like the Windows NT-based Visual Workstation series. The purchase and later sale of Cray also suggested that they didn’t know where their focus was.

This doesn’t have to be the end – perhaps it’s the end of the beginning and sgi will re-emerge a better and more focused company. Either way, I think it’s the end of IRIX – if sgi do survive, I think they’ll focus primarily in Linux-based systems, and abandon MIPS and IRIX to the history books.

I see that Sun were offering a reward for the porting of Linux to their CoolThreads-based systems (a reward I’m sure has been claimed now that David S. Miller has Linux booting multi-user on such systems). Come on Sun – why not offer the same reward for porting NetBSD to CoolThreads? After all, SunOS releases prior to 5.x were based on BSD and Sun has made past donations to The NetBSD Foundation.