unsigned long geek = random();

After putting up with it for a few weeks, I decided to replace the rather noisy boot drive in my AlphaServer 800, a DEC firmware 9GiB Seagate Cheetah (DEC RZ2DD-LS). The noisy drive, a 10,000rpm third generation ST39102LC, sounded like somebody burping next to me (yes, it was that loud). Of course, in my infinite wisdom, I replaced it with another drive of the same model (albeit with IBM firmware). My thinking was that the DEC firmware drive was “just noisy” and that the IBM firmware drive, being manufactured more recently, would be quieter. In retrospect, I have no idea what I was thinking, and the replacement drive is just as noisy. Unfortunately I don’t have any spare 10,000rpm SCA drives lying around, so I’ll just have to live with the burping Cheetah…

It’s quite interesting following the Sun T2000 performance contest. It’s a great marketing plan – generate some buzz about the new server (and the Niagara family of CPUs, and indirectly Solaris 10) by loaning them out for people to benchmark and play with for 60 days. If you publish some good results, you may even get to keep the server.

Some early articles I’ve read:

• Colm MacCárthaigh
• Robert Milkowski

I’d be very curious to see how an enterprise application like SAP ERP or a database like DB2 perform on the T2000. While not applications that one may traditionally associate with a highly threaded, multi-core CPU, I’m sure they’d see similar performance boosts to those seen by web applications. Certainly, any SAP-based application server, with its virtualization of the operating system processes into work processes, would benefit. It’s just a pity the competition and trial offer aren’t available in South Africa.

Something that pleases me about this – it shows Sun’s continued commitment to the SPARC architecture. With their punting of Opteron-based servers of late, I was beginning to fear for the continued survival of what is probably my favourite CPU family.

A few months ago, Steve Rikli sent me a SPARCstation 5 that he no longer had a use for. The machine arrived yesterday and boy was I impressed. Steve went to a lot of effort to make sure the machine was properly packed – it arrived in a very sturdy Cisco box, with inserts to hold the machine in place and plenty of plastic peanuts. In addition, in order to get the machine in the mail to me, Steve also had to suffer multiple trips to the post office because of the vagaries of USPS’s shipping policies and their maximum package sizes.

The machine itself is a very nice one: 170Mhz TurboSPARC CPU, 256MiB RAM, 73GiB Fujitsu HD, CD-ROM, cgsix, SunVideo and quad ethernet. He also tossed an SBus Fast Ethernet/wide SCSI adapter in the box. Thanks Steve!

For those interested, here is the dmesg output. Of course, it runs NetBSD

Went by a buddy of mine today to drop off some IRIX CDs and while I was there he passed along two more machines he’d rescued: a DEC Multia and a Sun Ultra 1.

The Multia is a low-end machine (my one has a 166Mhz Alpha CPU, 24MiB RAM and a 350MiB 2.5″ SCSI drive), but it’s still pretty neat. The small size, two PCMCIA slots and single PCI slot can make it into quite a neat wireless access point or broadband router. I’m having a little difficulty getting the SRM console to display on my el-cheapo test monitor (ARC works fine), but I’ll dig out a better monitor for testing tomorrow and then try and boot NetBSD on it.

The Ultra 1 (these things seem to be falling from the sky these days) is a non-E model with a dead CPU fan and no disks. The case is in good shape though and I think it should be pretty easy to get it into working order.

Ultra 1 PROM banner (note the ancient version!):
Sun Ultra 1 SBus (UltraSPARC 167MHz), No Keyboard
OpenBoot 3.0, 128 MB memory installed, Serial #7999316.
Ethernet address 8:0:20:7a:f:54, Host ID: 807a0f54.


As part of my ongoing project to get XFree86 working on a NetBSD/alpha system with a commodity PCI video card, I need to do a native build of XFree86. PR 29882 explains why the XFree86 X server is not included by default in the NetBSD release engineering releases, hence the need for my native build.

One slight potential fly in the ointment is that all my NetBSD source trees are stored on my source server and mounted read-only via NFS on the systems that need it. To build XFree86 with a read-only source tree requires a little trickery, but the procedure is nicely explained in the Building XFree86 from a Source Distribution guide (see page 3 onwards). The idea is to create a shadow tree containing symlinks to all the files in the original tree and using that to build instead of the original tree. It’s quick to set up and works very well.

Now to get a decent PCI video card…

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about XFree86 on NetBSD/alpha, I was pointed in the direction of these two very useful references:

• Digital AlphaServer XFree86 Code
• Tested Good Video cards

It seems like a lot of commodity PCI video cards Just Work(tm) with XFree86 in Alpha systems, but just for safety’s sake I think I’ll stick with one of the known good cards. PCI Radeon 7000s can apparently be had for R300 (about $45) from a local computer reseller – I’ll go and check them out tomorrow and probably pick one up. Getting the card locally will probably cost the same as eBaying one, but it’ll certainly be a lot quicker.

Two weeks ago Jonathan collected his “new” Alpha – an AlphaServer 800. Of course, being the good chap he is, he promptly loaned it to me for a few weeks. It’s a nice machine: 500Mhz EV5 (21164a) CPU, 1GiB RAM, 2x9GiB SCA drives, CD-ROM and 4/8GiB DDS2 tape drive.

The machine was running FreeBSD 5.2.1, which I promptly replaced with NetBSD 3.0. Installation was fairly straightforward, once I had correctly identified the CD-ROM drive (the AlphaLinux SRM HOWTO is useful in this regard).

After using the machine for two weeks (and somehow destroying my only working Alpha in the interim), I decided to buy the machine from him for the price he paid for it (nice chap that he is, he agreed to sell it to me at no profit).

Now to get x.org working on it, with a good PCI video card (preferably something that supports two heads and DVI)…

Care of the geeks list, I see that AOpen sell SPARC notebooks. Very interesting. I’m guessing that Rectron, our local AOpen distributor, won’t be stocking ‘em any time soon though