JumpStarting a Sun Fire V100

[@JustJustSid]

Find yourself someone who loves you as much as clabretro loves Sun Fires

[@samsthomas]

I sadly quit being hands-on with SPARCs just about the time they quit being beige. I have a Netra T1 105 leaning up against the wall next to my desk, but like the V120, it's too much noise to have on except for occasional playing with.

[@HyenaEmpyema]

Hot little-endian single-Us are in your area!

[@BobDarlington]

I ran hundreds of diskless sun and sgi workstations, jumpstart servers, you name it. It was always a pain till it started to work right. Watching this I'm seeing how similar it is to kickstart with Linux is today. Seriously swing through New Mexico sometime and I have hardware for you.

[@clabretro]

I'm actually just over in Colorado! shoot me an email if you'd like (channel's info section, might need to be on desktop to get to it). at the very least I'd be interested in hearing about your collection!

[@lancealat3791]

Clabretro your videos bring me so much joy watching you work with obsolete hardware keep making these quality videos

[@clabretro]

glad to hear that!

[@spewp]

The response to ping being "is alive" is fantastically Solaris. The kind of obscurity I'm here for. ❤

[@clabretro]

yes haha

[@user-ds8kw7gg1x]

это пинг курильщика! в пинге здорового человека должен быть ответ сколько-то миллисекунд

[@MetalSamurai99]

This was my day job in the early 90s. Once Solaris got stable enough for actual use (2.5.1) and not just daily screaming at how awful SysV was compared to proper SunOS, I managed the overnight upgrade of several labs full of ELCs, IPCs and IPXs, as well as some SPARCstation 10s we had set up as servers with RAID storage and a bank of shared CDroms all done using JumpStart and completely hands free. Preconfigure the packages for each class of computer, post install scripts to install all the latest patches, set up local root passwords, join NIS+, add printers, with the correct default for each floor. Login screens. Everything. Go round each lab and press L1-A, then boot net - install. Go home. Come back in the morning and everything is upgraded and working. Just loved Jumpstart. It meant new workstations could be installed remotely by anyone who can plug in a mains cable. Just tell me the MAC address printed on the box, plug it in, I’ll have it booted, installed, upgraded and customised without leaving my desk.

[@MetalSamurai99]

Oh, and this was all over 10b2 coax Ethernet, not your fancy super fast 100Mb twisted pair stuff.

[@Codeaholic1]

FYI Serial "break" sends the stop-a key, which will suspend the OS and drop you to the ok prompt. BTW jumpstart is how i learned to use tcpdump. The process is pretty straight forward. Rarp to get an ip. Bootp to find the tftp and nfs boot server, tftp dowload /. Boot from the image, nfs mount / from jumpstart server, run the installer shell script.

[@sterbebett]

I gotta stop calling your channel _Claberto_ in my head whenever a new video pops

[@clabretro]

haha I think that's pretty common

[@BartKus]

Oh great, now I'm gonna start saying that way.

[@donatj]

Better than "that Sun guy" that I call him

[@bikeforever2016]

He's Clabreto to me 😁

[@thatLion01]

I honestly thought we're going to do something crazy to jump start the power supply. You learn something new everyday. Thank you amazing video on a Friday night. Jumpstart server

[@bw6378]

Sun racks had round holes while the rest of the world used square. I went through all this Sun stuff back in the day when we were starting up an ISP. Thanks for the dose of nostalgia. lol

[@DarrenPoulson]

I spent so much time working on jumpstart scripts. Oh, and sun racks didn't use cage nuts like most other racks, they actually had rails with threaded holes. At least all the ones I worked with did.

[@ch3rbert]

@@DarrenPoulson They used cage nuts starting with the SunRack 900 in the early 2000s. But you’re right, before that they just had holes drilled. I have one of those racks in my garage full of Sun gear and some networking equipment.

[@DarrenPoulson]

@@ch3rbert Ah, that makes sense. We only had a few cabinets, most of the servers I had the pleasure of working on *were* the cabinets (E6500, 6800, etc.) :D Then we moved to non-sun cabinets for everything in the mid 2000's.

[@damirkvajo]

"But I'm not exactly going for practical, down here" - and that's why we love ya :))

[@MR.Peanut2]

Gotta love when someone from like 13 years ago can fix your problems

[@wlhyatt100]

When I became a network engineer in the 00's I was that coors light is the beer of network engineers by someone who had held the title much longer than me. Now I pass the baton to you.

[@clabretro]

haha perfect

[@blevenzon]

Soooooooooo glad the algorithm made be stumble on your channel, love your content so much. I can’t help but wonder what your electric bill is like 😂😂😂

[@clabretro]

haha luckily the older stuff doesn't run 24/7. I really need to measure the homelab rack though

[@blevenzon]

@ I’m dying to find out. I really want to pick some older IBM stuff my self, so just curious.

[@jroysdon]

@@blevenzon - right? I'm power budget conscious and love running power-efficient modern gear like RPi4, N100, etc.

[@jackwosullivan]

This brings back memories. I retired the last of our SunFires in 2019 and it was very much a sad day to take them out of production.

[@OneDudeWithACamera]

I'm glad to see someone who loves the Sun branding as much as I do. It was gorgeous and you're right, they really did know their branding

[@jroysdon]

I recall setting up a rack of these Sun Fire and using the Jumpstart process around the time these were made ~2002. I'd done plenty of NetWare, Microsoft, and Linux networking prior to this, but this was my first time setting up Sun gear from scratch. I don't recall much about it other than it was uneventfully simple and just worked. Once the OS and the service basics were done I handed them off to the DBA/App groups to do their thing. I never had problems with them. I would occasionally add a new batch of them to the server room as things grew. I see someone else said that Jumpstart and such was hard to get going. I already had experience with Pxeboot, Red Hat Kickstart, etc., so this really wasn't that different, just Sun's flavor.

[@br3nd4n]

Another Friday night, another instalment of clabretro working on Sun machines. I very much hope that we get a cinematic unveiling of the 42U retro rack once it's filled up!

[@cocusar]

how we have progressed from RARP to PXE with dhcp/bootp. excellent video and waiting for the second part!

[@RoyHess666]

Also: In this video I learned what the text on the white pipe on the wall in the background says in full! Never been able to see the complete text, now I know it is not just for drain waste water, but also for vent! 😀😀😀

[@theodoredurst6931]

Very glad you removed the noise canceling on the v120, I got the noise down on mine by replacing the case fans with Noctua Server fans years ago, so you might consider that. The original P/S fan still makes some noise, so it is not nearly as silent as the v100. You have some serious envy on that. I did have the training on JumpStart, but it was for 11.x and I mostly mess around with 9s and 10s at home. So was kind of a waste, aside for a project at work years ago.

[@RandomTechWZ]

Working in IT in the 80s/90s/00s had to feel magical at times.

[@RonJohn63]

More like black magic, chicken blood, incantations and lots of swearing.

[@eehawkee]

There isn't a problem with the V100 and the Fast MMU miss errors, OBP won't initialise all the hardware in normal boot modes (kinda like modern PCs with Fast Boot, that will disable USB, etc) to increase boot speed, setting auto-boot? to false and rebooting will do a full boot except loading the client program. It could be more graceful however, on some others there is a warning (especially for the probe-scsi-all command) that will warn it probably fail unless you reset (with auto-boot? false)

[@joen1835]

This is the answer!

[@ch3rbert]

Yep, i have lots of forth experience. Pro tip, the sifting command is very handy. Can’t remember the exact syntax of that command you used 3 years ago? Use sifting (ie: sifting boot). This will show you all of the acceptable commands that have the word boot in them. This video takes me back. When I was new at Sun, I was an onsite field engineer for a large telco provider’s call center. Every desk had a SPARCstation4 or 5 and the users often put them on theirs sides, significantly reducing airflow. This killed a lot of power supplies and hard drives. I’d replace the drive, call up to IT and have them uncomment the ethers for the host (they were there, just commented out until they really needed it). Working at Sun was probably the best job I ever had, I loved it and loved the people I worked with.

[@davidhalliday7776]

You are lucky! The Netra V120 was a PITA due to the dodgy mezzanine RAM card. Those Netra's were always a bit of a pain but yes we used netboot and even had diskless workstations on Sun in the late 80s using Sparc Stations 2's! I could get to something similar with PXEBoot and Linux, but it was never as good. Sun really did drive "the network is the computer mentality" You really should look at automount and NFS as a file server, and NIS or NIS+ for that retro rack. With these, you can log on to any host, have your home folder automatically from the network, mount your /usr/local with all your apps on all the hosts, and it all just works.

[@MrOpenGL]

Is the SunFire v120 affected by the same issue? My website is still running on a v120 to this day and I've never ever had a single problem with it (running Debian SPARC of course)

[@paullee107]

Really enjoy your videos. Please know theres nerds out here that enjoy these. Thanks.

[@TheChristopherTerry]

You have more patience that I do. i would have given up and thrown that thing in a landfill 🤣Keep the content coming, I love seeing all of your retro kit coming to life. Best Wishes From Hartlepool, North East England

[@charlesturner897]

YESSS CLAB POSTED AGAIN!!!

[@jroysdon]

It's like Christmas, but I don't have to buy anything, hah!

[@tobiasgoeller6592]

Yes, we had this errors too. Don't forget... your network is generations newer than the old networks we had in the early 2000s

[@spectreofspace]

I bought one of these same "new" old stock V100s off eBay months ago. Never saw that "Fast Data Access MMU Miss" error but then I also set auto-boot to false as the very first thing I did. I could be mistaken but setting the boot-mode to forth and using poweron also seems to skip the initialization routines that show the model, cpu, memory total, serial, and ethernet, which could explain why test-all wasn't able to complete. The hard drive in mine also shows issues, but not every time I've reinstalled Solaris. It's currently working fine and is running as both a JumpStart and NIS server.

[@markjstradling]

Old Solaris system admin in me was going: turn off auto-boot. Type break on th lom if it boots. Tcpdump on the jumpstart server.

[@dmurphynj]

Oh no, Linux has warped your brain! Back in the day we used snoop for network tracing and liked it. ;-)

[@markjstradling]

@ oh crap, yeah. Snoop. It’s been well over a decade. I’m fully ashamed for forgetting the lore

[@dmurphynj]

⁠@@markjstradlingJust breaking chops - it’s been a while for me too! Good stuff - was so far ahead of its day. And even now there’s things about Sol 11 I wish Linux would adopt ….

[@markjstradling]

@@dmurphynj I've never worked anywhere that bothered with Solaris 11. Generally if there's any Sun left, it's on Sol10 with a strong directive to go to RHEL. Not that I'm an SA anymore so maybe I'm a little bit behind.

[@wardtj]

So, back in the day, I did patentable work on building systems that could change their UNIX version on the fly to support dynamics compute workloads. Machines could boot between Solaris 2.6, 8, 9 and 10. I wrote a bunch of tools that managed that. There's tonnes of ways to automate it. It was pretty cool then :) That used tar images and updating the boot sector on the systems, plus nvram updates.

[@RobertoRubio-ij3ms]

Amazing video. Absolute nostalgia,

[@archtechgr]

Woho! I have a v120 that i got 20+ years back! Last time I used it was running OpenBSD.

[@rezdm]

Heh, about a month ago I bought Netra 105, but the seller forgot root password, and I am really struggling booting it. Your video is a blessing to try doing another network booting. Thanks!!

[@samsthomas]

Jumpstart was so much kludge. Fully backwards compatible, though. If you had a netbootable machine, you could install some version of compatible Slolaris from a jumpstart server. For real fun, make your RARP/TFTP (memory is those have to be the same) and install servers separate. It's hard to believe we did that on 100Mb ethernet and were thankful for the speed.

[@buffuniballer]

You had 100mb? In the 90s we did it on 10mb coax for a Sun Training Center. Every Friday I would bring the jumpstart server online and reimagine 14 SPARC5 workstations for the next class. Once they were all going, I’d leave and check them early Monday morning to make sure they reimagined.

[@samsthomas]

@@buffuniballer I was really only doing Slolaris management 1998-2000ish. We weren't really a "large installation", so before there were many workstations to manage they were built with an external CDROM drive one at a time. I only did the sun4u machines with JS. The 4c and 4m machines were dwindling, so in the rare case they got reimaged it was done by hand. Ironically, most of the ultras had internal CDROM drives that only ever got used for playing music CDs by the operators.

[@MrWelshsean]

We did some pretty cool stuff with jumpstart back in the day. At one point we were building images (flash archives) for workstations in a telco noc . The flash archives were a pain because you had do the normal imaging shenanigans rather than editing a config file or script. They were super fast to build the machine though (old interview question there). If you enjoy jumpstart, maybe get some hp9000 machines and play with Ignite-UX. You could build your own install tapes and net installs. You could also make recovery tapes over the network. When we built out a new regional trading floor, we’d send out an engineer with a DDS2, there’d be a rack of a500s waiting. we’d build the first machine using the Ignite tape and that would build it as an ignite server to build the rest of the rack from over the network,

[@wysoft]

it's sad to me that Sun died off when their entry level hardware was really starting to hit its stride and become more affordable, thanks to commoditization of buses, storage interfaces, USB, etc. Personally these machines were always decent to work with. Also by this time Linux on Sparc was also very solid, so you didn't have to deal with Solaris if you didn't have to. Thanks for the video

[@vt2k1]

I used to netboot v125, v210 and v240's about 10 years ago, and got really good and figuring out the quirks. If you want to stop trying to boot off the hard drive everytime you power on, type "setenv auto-boot? false" at the ok prompt. That way you will just stay the ok prompt and run the boot command at your leisure. Set it back to true when you are done with the install. If you want to permanently netboot (i.e. run the machine completely on the network), you can do that as well. You have to manipulate the bootparams file (or boot using DHCP, which the v120 can do). I had a v120 booting fully off the network and running well using only NFS. I took the hard drives out completely.

[@TrolleyMC]

The retro rack is coming along nicely. Shame that old drive is dead, but expected. How much do you like compact flash cards? There's tons of IDE adapters to use those with old PCs, I'm not sure how compatible they are with Sun hardware if at all, but I think that's a worthy contender for a replacement. IDK if you edited it out, but you should replace that servers thermal paste if you haven't already, can't imagine how old that crap is.

[@clabretro]

I was thinking I'll try a compact flash adapter in there, just to see how it does! And good call... I should replace the paste (it might be a thermal pad, but should probably replace that too).

[@TheStefanskoglund1]

I believe compact flash cards to be a little slow ...... though a v100 due to it's IDE only is already slow as it is....

[@bududdy]

Made my night. Thanks for posting!

[@RedShift5]

Get yourself a switch that can do port mirroring and run wireshark on the mirrored port to see what's really going on with those ARP/RARP timeouts

[@clabretro]

yup! need to do that for some other projects too

[@MarkTinberg]

@@clabretro or install tcpdump/wireshark on the solaris 10 machine so you can see if it's receiving the rarp/tftp and responding correctly or not

[@SB-qm5wg]

That V100 is freakin' *mint* 🌟

[@LeeZhiWei8219]

Welcome back to Sun! 🤣 Awesome video again man. Great stuff!

[@codeman99-dev]

I have strong desire to write my own ping utility now. Call it "toss". A fully success result is "My friend caught all 4 packets!" A total failure is "Oh no! My friend dropped all the packets! There must be a hole in his glove..."

[@TheRedbeardster]

Breathtaking quest!

[@ProjectGeek1]

I had about 20 of these at one point. A local to me VPN Provider was replacing their DC hardware with more VM based solutions. They were selling various states of V100s for $5-$20. I grabbed about 20 of them and filled my Jetta. I ran everything from VoIP to Minecraft on these. I miss Sun so much :/

[@BobDarlington]

I bought a bunch of those new. Ran Solaris 9 at the time. There's two out in my shop if you want to come get em!

[@clabretro]

ha, i would feel greedy with more than one

[@fawedde]

I'm the other way around. I have one, maybe two scsi drives. But i have somewhere between 20 to 30 ide drives. Mostly due to my Amigas and old pcs. Nice video as always!

[@Oronak]

hell yeah dude just sat down with a beer

[@clabretro]

excellent

[@drtweak87]

OH man! This just flashed backed nightmares! haha our HS had a bunch of these for web servers for hosting either class documents to download or to upload. I remember my IT teacher showing me how to set this guy up. Was above my Jr class IT Knowledge lol We did have other Sunfires that ran Terminal servers. 2 of them each running 5. We also took Red Hat LTSP, tossed that on some IBM P4 servers, turned on P1s into Terminal, had a Mac OSX server for storage server (1.5 TB. Was a ton back back. Was 8 200GB SATA drives when SATA was brand spanking new) and then a W2K3 server as a Read Only domain controller for AD/LAPD integration between everything. Was beautiful. Then the IT director of the district who only knew windows, didn't like it, and then installed new HP managed switches to actually make our life harder when they said it would make it easier.

[@drtweak87]

Also that V100. Sure its not new in the box?? that thing looks and apparently smells new in the box. New old stock or something?

[@davidwilkerson1904]

@31:39 Hence for the ole classic computer maintenance question. 'Did you restart your computer?'

[@thecatofnineswords]

An unboxing video of purple? Ohmygoodness!!! I have a V120 lurking in storage, but it's got an unknown password on the firmware. I'll pull it out and get it working again one day.

[@JamesBos]

Man, I’ve been listening to the 0xide and friends pod, it would be pretty incredible if they had you on as a guest. I know Brian worked on more of the OS level stuff at Sun (and dtrace ofc) but still, I can imagine you guys talking shop about Sun all day long!

[@clabretro]

haha that's high praise, I would be out of my league. I love that podcast though!

[@MrWelshsean]

If you like that I’d suggest listening to “On The Metal” which was their podcast from before the Oxide one. There were some very interesting people on that pod, wish they’d do more!

[@cameramaker]

8:10 - hidden riddle saying that HDD is elsewhere - I think that is pretty funny little touch to the whole experience :D And speaking of lowest of lowends .. noticed how the single HDD shares its IDE bus with the optical drive? That would be a no-no for a proper system. Also I believe that the UltraSPARC II processors use the Intel PGA370 socket - I am rather a hardware guy. Btw I recently got a Sun M5000 ... your jumpstarts will be very useful once I put it back together. Thanks a lot!

[@tommajor2940]

One thing I found useful in troubleshooting possible network issues is to use a managed switch with the capabilities to mirror ports. I would then mirror either the port connecting to the Sun Fire V100 or the proxmox port of the JumpStart server to a separate dedicated port where I would run a Wireshark session on another computer. This will enable you to see the arp traffic and the connection process via ethernet packets. This will tell you if the arp blast are actually being sent and getting to the JumpStart server or if the JumpStart server is not answering the request.

[@clabretro]

Yes! I've actually needed this several times, I'm going to set it up on some Cisco gear soon.

[@keyboard_g]

Yes the slightly different Sun rack. I have a purple color match 42U sun rack where rack nuts won’t fit. I hand screw servers and shelves in.

[@808jpm]

There’s an eBay listing for new v210’s, but they don’t show boxes and have damaged labels/scratches. Almost had to grab them when I thought you might have. Thanks for another sun video. All these suns and rs/p series machines you have…one is begging to be NFS and NIS for all the others.

[@clabretro]

I've been tempted by the v210s haha. and yes, absolutely will be exploring a dedicated NFS and NIS setup!

[@FlameSoulis]

Yup, I had one that was given to me by my late aunt. Me and a friend almost got Minecraft running on it, but trying to get it to work on unsupported Java was pain. Also, the irony it was connected to an IBM xSeries server just so it can be turned on, which WAS the Minecraft server, was pretty funny.

[@OzeCovers]

More!!!! Thanks clab!

[@Uluze2]

The silver bullet and networking... that usually results in a lot of choice words and sometimes (My favorite) a RUD with some spicy powders in the right mix

[@gavinguy148]

I had that Solaris 9 study guide and help me get my SCSA certification 😂 memories flooding back 👍

[@dmurphynj]

“Which” SCSA was that? System Admin or Security Admin? I was in Sun’s first security boot camp and beta tested the cert exam. Those were the days ….

[@gavinguy148]

@ system admin. I did the Solaris 10 system admin cert before moving into a different area of IT.

[@dmurphynj]

@@gavinguy148 Those were the good days …. I still bleed Sun purple deep down. Solaris forever!

[@neiltheplayer]

Very interesting. Thank you for posting

[@andyg8888]

Heck yeah here we go with a clab drop! Let’s get into it fellas!

[@tammymakesthings]

I remember building a JumpStart server on a SPARCstation 20 (or maybe a SPARCstation 5; I forget now) many years ago. It was a cool technology when it worked, but getting it scaffolded and running was a tedious (and as I recall, poorly documented) process.😊

[@maxdiamond55]

You can get ide boards with SD card slots to emulated Hds. Got one for a boss digital multi tracker I'm fixing and it works perfectly.

[@luks-3]

I remember having issues with the jumpstart. It's picky about the network stuff. I tried it with a linux VM first, didn't work. I think I finally got it working using a laptop running linux. Of course much cooler to use Solaris as the jumpstart server :D

[@nelizmastr]

Just pop in a SATA SSD with one of those startech IDE to SATA adapters. Had a lot of good luck with them on systems as old as a Pentium II and even an original Xbox.

[@nickbeleacov5893]

Thanks for the videos, you can use any old PC and MHDD or Victoria dos software to test the hdd and make sure it works, and even sometimes you can low level format it(basically write all zeroes) and sometimes BadBlocks will go away.

[@NatesRandomVideo]

Plugging both boxes into the dumb switch (can still have an uplink if other things need to be talking to your larger network) should help those RARP timeouts and speed up things a bit.

[@rovert94]

I would love to see you do a Novell Netware install. That was THE network operating system in the early-to-mid PC days.

[@clabretro]

yes, someday!

[@blademan7671]

Apple PowerPC in the ‘90s also had Open Firmware. I remember it took me days to install Linux. And longer to get X window up and running.

[@thecatofnineswords]

I miss the Apple and Sun firmware prompts. They were so much cleaner than PC BIOS and easier to use.

[@bradwilmot5066]

I've never been able to work out why, but the RARP issues may have something to do with proxmox... we have an ancient air handler controller that netboots from its' server using RARP. When we moved that server (Slackware) to our proxmox machine, it started raising hell and taking a million tries to boot with RARP timeouts. I moved the server VM over to our ESXI machine, and the problem went away. RARP in my office means Reallly Am Royally Pissed...

[@TheStefanskoglund1]

Proxmox is a linux ? and rarp is a pretty low level proto, it doesn't need IP, so i believe Linux by default nowadays blocks older non-IP protocols. Compare setting up rarp and bootp on a netbsd box.

[@JamesWoglom]

did you try replacing the cmos battery to see if it helped prevent the v100 from forgetting its settings?

[@clabretro]

yeah, no luck :(

[@abb1793]

I'm a very nervous person... "I bought this because it was pristine, particularly the fragile graphics on the top of the case..." "Now let me dump a rack server on that fragile graphic and push it around a lot, rubbing the top server over that fragile graphic"...

[@RonJohn63]

1:44 Don't mock. Oracle bought Rdb/VMS (an RDBMS specific to OpenVMS) from DEC in 1998, and have supported it for all these years. Many new versions were released until around 2010.

[@ricardobornman1698]

The sad thing is that you can only appreciate the engineering that went into designing the equipment so many years after the fact.

[@mykolapliashechnykov8701]

And it still came out finicky as hell. Like, you charge through the nose compared to the AMD64 counterparts and your fast ethernet (fast ethernet? on a 2006 server?) still fails to work. No wonder they all got overrun as soon as the computing capabilities were there.

[@trilader]

Looks like KZbin decided to auto translate the video title/description. At first I was really confused when a video with a title in my native language popped up in my subscriptions feed (I follow very few channels that produce content in that language). At least it didn't default to the auto translated audio track with horrible ai-generated voice. Is there a way to turn that off for just me or is that something the channel has to do (and for now still can do)?

[@clabretro]

it was auto-opted in for the channel. I've turned it off for future videos!

[@DarrenMossAU]

They are great old workhorses. I wonder if you could install an emulated IDE disk ?? That would be an interesting experiment and could potentially increase it's capacity as a JumpStart server.

[@Coffeeology]

I was here for the whole event.

[@noth606]

05:00 on, if cast metal cased adapters are cheap and chintzy to you, I have to wonder what you would consider to be a less cheap and chintzy option?! Machined billet gold?

[@clabretro]

they were plastic lol

[@lgmuniz]

Take a shot every time he says "sophisticated"

[@clabretro]

dangerous

[@Tinker001]

I tried... I really tried... But Both new bottles of rye are now empty & I can't seem to find my feet.

[@vilhalmer]

I missed JumpStart by a couple decades, but I spent over a year working on a PXE/TFTP boot system for internal tools automation at my last job and nothing has changed. It's completely undebuggable and getting it to behave often feels like you just have to pick the right deity to pray to that week.

[@ElectronicSearch3.0]

Hey,ive been watching your channel for quite some time and really enjoy it. I run my schools computer club wand wanted to know what things like network wise or computer wise i could get them to do, so far i have a Macintosh lc580 a fax machine and some 5 port switch from 2012 with 3 optiplexes from around 2013.

[@hakureicirno6059]

What kind of information is stored in the System Configuration Card, and why it’s in a form factor of a card? For easy migrations of configurations between servers ?

[@straightup7up]

I got one of these few years back, could barely run the OS, tried upgrading the RAM but bricked the unit instead- RIP ,😅

[@waldfruchttee]

i have some (atleast 5) old 20gb maxtor IDE drives laying around which might still working but i dont think that size will be of any use today... (gotta test em at some time)

[@throblet]

You can get bidirectional IDE-SATA converters which may open up your hard disk options 🤔

[@n_sotnikov]

JumpStart, it's like JumpScare

[@emmettkeyser1110]

The troubleshooting is the fun part so I wouldn't worry if people made it this far. :-)

[@xav500011]

I have a Sun FIre T1000. I used a Arduino Nano microcontroller to fake the fan PWM signal of 487 MHZ. Then I used 80mm fans to cool the computer but because these spare fans are twice the height of the 1U server I to had keep the lid off. I got Solaris Jumpstart in a Virtualbox virtual machine to work which let me install Solaris. But after that I could not get a different network boot installer to work for Debian Linux. The T1000 would not boot from any SATA CD-ROM. Maybe the computer Firmware was out of date but annoyingly the public can't download Sun Microsystems computer firmware without a corporate account.

[@thelegion_within]

get an ide to tf or ssd adapter (I'd think that pata ssd's would be prohibitively expensive these days) - no moving parts = fewer chances for hardware level errors....

[@yearning9767]

the video is for some reason dubbed in my native language when i watch it on the app with no option to change the audio track?? i noticed this on a number of other videos but it's the first time it's happened on your channel, i really don't know what youtube is thinking

[@clabretro]

yeah they warned me they would start doing that for new videos, kinda weird

[@itperdition]

You should get an ide to sata ssd adapter. IDE drives are old and just waiting for a failure.

[@UnixGoldBoy]

What was the title of the video you made where you described the coating on a server as being toxic if you touch it? It was something about old servers that have a purple or colored tint to the metal that you shouldn't touch. I'm trying to find that video so I can share it with my museum coordinator. We have a lot of that type of stuff sitting out on the floor.

[@clabretro]

hmm not sure, might've been another channel!

[@vasiliynkudryavtsev]

I've never seen anyone to use Forth language interpreter as a boot manager shell. Well, always something new.

[@welsh1lad]

I had the sun Netra , knew nothing about it . Added two drives and installed Ubuntu Spark . Learnt how to NetBoot these things and get it installed. Turned into a mail server I. The day.

[@rewtdawg9852]

I still have one of these still plugged in

[@joen1835]

I went through all this on my sparc v100 as well. You cannot access the OK prompt by doing boot mode forth and then run commands, it doesn’t work (will get mmu errors) 1) set boot mode to forth. 2) once at ok, run setenv auto-boot? false 3) reset-all This will drop you back at the ok prompt and everything will work as expected. 🎉

[@Ryet9]

🌞 sooo clean

[@Afsafs123]

I'm curious if you could use an IDE to SATA adapter and then plug in a generic SSD. Period accurate? No, but it would be reliable and fast.

[@clabretro]

I think so, probably what I'll do actually