Developing Software for a Sun Fire v440

[@skver]

man, you got me hooked on old sun stuff

[@razzledev]

Me too

[@sinner_ssaint]

+1

[@LeeZhiWei8219]

+1

[@alexdhall]

Ditto!

[@keraptus9816]

+1

[@kavehvahedipour2089]

I built on one of these the full delivery for 50+k shares and securities values visualization for 4 major German national newspaper websites. To drawing charts etc. 40+k requests per sec not sweating it. The Application was mostly C/C++ for performance but some Java for the maintenance interface. The hilarious thing was that I had a Sun kernel dev on a call, who diagnosed under voltage on some pci pin with that machines raid controller. Nice job on the video brought back some sweet memories. Sun was a solid shop.

[@clabretro]

Ha that's awesome. Always interesting to hear stories about this stuff!

[@bradleystannard3492]

It’s great to see a ‘smaller’ channel like this growing and gaining more and more subscribers. Here’s to the road to 10k and many many more!

[@clabretro]

thank you!!

[@RobertLiesenfeld]

By 10k, you mean seeing an Ultra Enterprise 10000 on the channel, right? OK maybe not, but I can dream... ;)

[@carloisdoingstupidtechstuff]

@@clabretro 12:38 I didn't know computers can feel emotions xD EMOTIONAL DAMAGE!

[@DominicGo]

the color scheme is so pretty (and kind of evangelion coded, especially the green accent + motherboard) "get in the JVM, shinji"

[@Sungak_A]

When I left my previous work in 2019, there were still a decent number of V440s chugging along in medium to small workloads - including a few production database servers. They were in the process of migrating to an all-Linux solution. Big Sun shop in the day, including an old L700 tape library, and worked on nearly every Sparc from the Sparc 2 to the v880/890, and a few oddballs for short periods (including Sun Blades, and the first T1000s ever made). Main SPARC workhorses over the years were the Sparc 20 (/w Ross CPU), Ultra-2, V240/440, E450, V480 and T2000. The main x64 ones were the 4100, 4600 (ick) and 4170. Note: Be VERY careful with those power supplies, the fans LOVE to seize up; used to keep 5-6 older ones around as spares. Good way to test: Hold it by the handle, let it hang down, and rotate it back and forth with your wrist. If the fan inside stays still, it still has good bearings.

[@clabretro]

Amazing. I get the feeling there's a lot of this Sun gear still out there chugging along.

[@AureliusR]

Did you ever get to play with any of the big stuff, like the e10k?

[@Sungak_A]

@@AureliusR Largest system would be a v1280 or older e6500. Largest storage would be the L700, though as an early Temp worker I did interact with actual Powderhorns, just very rarely. After that, things started to go drastically smaller again, and scaling out (via multiple smaller systems) became the new hotness.

[@JesseTheStig]

Man you hit the jackpot with both of those being fully populated with not only cpus and ram but also hard drives! What a score! Shoutout to Andy!

[@clabretro]

agreed!

[@billburr5881]

wait until he sees the power bill!

[@alexdhall]

@@billburr5881 I honestly wouldn't want to be in the same room as these v440's when the fans are at full blast on power on. Rack servers can sometimes get *quite* loud at times....😬

[@succuvamp_anna]

First free beer from being a retro enterprise hardware youtuber? I think Craft Computing would be proud lol

[@danclough104]

I knew a guy who would get these by the pallet doing DC decommissions. Sadly, I never had the thought (or the free space) to grab one. That purple grille design is so iconic and seeing it always takes me back. Great content!

[@clabretro]

Thanks! Yeah the best deals are always around when you don't need them. Many many computers over the years I wish I still had or had bought.

[@leosmithonbass]

the music at 15:23 and onward was PERFECT for the situation.

[@markpriceful]

10/10 - you sounded so confident about building your enterprise app, i literally LOL'd when you started googling it. great work!

[@yjk_ch]

17:07 finally, someone who gave some love to the full name of String class, java.lang.String. Normally, java.lang. is omitted as java.lang is already included by default.

[@Pfych]

Randomly had this series pop up in my recommended and now I’m obsessed with legacy sun stuff! Great series.

[@clabretro]

Thanks!

[@alexdhall]

Same here. The Sun Ray series popped into my recommendations....and here we are!

[@datPinto]

Whew, I do remember when these servers were new... racked quite a few of them.

[@geoshapka]

Grafana itself has "grafana k6" - its a load testing tool, could be used to generate pretty big load, give that a try as well! Love this Sun development and deploying stuff - we have come so far with all that docker and k8s stuff now a day :)

[@alphaLONE]

I'd never thought I'd watch a video with Enterprise Java today! Keep it up! Love the videos, you're a great host and I can't wait for the next releases!

[@clabretro]

Thanks!

[@luis167]

I installed many v440s in the past. Informix, Oracle, Containers clusters... large machines, powerful, heavy, durable

[@theserialport]

Great video showing you actually _using_ a retro environment!

[@rayk32]

This is awesome fun stuff you are doing. I loved Sun products and the history of the company and its founders is very interesting. These people were/are brilliant. I was sad to see the company come to an end. Keep it up!

[@clabretro]

Thanks!

[@jjjjentges]

At my employer we took our last V440s offline in August of 2022. They were used in a VCS oracle database cluster. Only reason they were shut down was because our new SAN switches no longer supported the HBAs in the Sunfires. They are still sitting in our data center, i think you inspired me to try and get one of them home 😂

[@clabretro]

Ha that's amazing. I think there is still a lot of this Sun gear running out there. If you have the space these v440s are great! Really fun to play around with and quite capable. And if you can find one locally like that it's the way to go, impossibly heavy to ship around.

[@jjjjentges]

​@clabretro we still have some SPARC M5000s and T4-2s running solaris zones. Solaris zones would be a cool topic to cover on the channel. Kind of led the way for modern Linux containerizarion.

[@puffinrock2871]

I’m a simple man. I see clab using Sun anything, I hit the like button. This was a cool look back in time… fun stuff.

[@clabretro]

haha love it. thanks for watching!

[@nukelauncher95]

I just wanted to say that I've really been enjoying your vids. All of this old Sun stuff is pretty interesting to me. It's way before my time but there's something about old enterprise stuff that's fascinating. Sun was like the Apple of the IT world. Also, The KZbin algorithm is scarily good at reccomendations. That's how I found you. It knows me better than I know myself. KZbin aggressively began recommending me your channel a couple weeks ago. Your vids were always at the top of my home page and at the top of the recommendations on every video, and YT even automatically reenabled autoplay and always had your videos next in the queue. I'm glad I decided to watch instead of clicking ignore. Keep up the good work.

[@clabretro]

Thank you! Definitely more to come, I'm glad you're enjoying the videos.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Sun was more like Microsoft - the big gorilla that everybody else feared and envied. The most technologically cutting-edge company of the Unix era would have had to be SGI. Their gear could run rings around everybody else. And they had a price tag to match.

[@JustPlainRob]

Those little clip posts were replaceable because they broke. I used to have a little bag of them in the pre-Oracle days.

[@Codeaholic1]

The big things in Solaris 10 were SMF, dtrace, and ZFS. I'd love to see deep dives in to each. Cheers and keep up the great content.

[@clabretro]

Yeah I used to be stingy with those SCSI drives but now I've got enough to do some full ZFS setups in the future!

[@thecatofnineswords]

I really, seriously miss being a Solaris 10 sysAdmin. SMF and ZFS were just wonderful to configure and use.

[@DarrenPoulson]

@@clabretro What you need to keep an eye out for is a thumper box. :D Had one of those as a netbackup media server. 48 x 1Tb drives.

[@djtomoy]

After watching a load of your videos I feel a lot more prepared if I do travel back in time to 2002 and end up working in the IT department of a bank or something like that.

[@AnonYmous-tx2sc]

Scratching the very small/niche itch I have once again 👌

[@oldpain7625]

Woah, I remember these systems. Haven't seen one in decades.

[@mkelly0x20]

I've been developing Java apps of the enterprise-y variety for almost a decade at this point, but not as far back as this. However, things aren't huuuuugely different in a lot of regards. The "build a single file on your desktop / build server and deploy that on your web server" is still a key part of the lifecycle for those apps, though the details tend to differ a lot now. Instead, we are more often deploying a "standalone" .jar file that runs via a Docker container, rather than EAR or WAR files running in a servlet container. The big difference is that Back In The Day everything needed a lot more XML to configure & deploy it than we tend to need now.

[@clabretro]

Oh yeah I can imagine things have improved. I thought about making an actual backend (SOAP or just XML over HTTP) but it seemed like way too much effort haha.

[@clabretro]

And yeah it was XML everywhere.

[@dirkfromhein]

Kinda funny… I’ve not done EJB/J2EE in about 20yrs 😀 XML was just getting to be all the rage back then. When in doubt make it XML! We built one of the first XML Messaging frameworks based on XML-RPC, Then later SOAP 1.0 - before they went insane with the standard! 🤣

[@enchantingendlers2105]

Love your videos! Had been dealing with Sun stuff during my university times and loved it. You bring back so many memories!

[@clabretro]

Thanks for watching!

[@straightup7up]

Can't believe what I'm watching, EJB development on Sun, it's been years! Well, you picked the simplest kind of EJB to develop that's for sure - stateless session beans.

[@LeeZhiWei8219]

This is super awesome... Getting my Sun Ray running has been a challenge. Especially since I got other stuff. Will post something soon. I can't wait to see/hopefully get a sun hardware soon.

[@LeeZhiWei8219]

Also. Wow modular CPU units. I don't see those nowadays. Maybe a blade server is the closest thing.

[@clabretro]

Thanks! Let me know if I can help with the Sun Rays (but I haven't ever used the Linux version of the server).

[@LeeZhiWei8219]

​@@clabretrobtw! How is your network connected? As in are you sun ray servers and clients, are they in a VLAN where the sun ray server gives out DHCP addresses? Or is it your actual router doing the job. Do you need to set any DHCP options if its your router giving it out?

[@clabretro]

Just my router doing the DHCP work, no special DHCP options (in a previous video I thought that was required, but it isn't). So the Sun Ray Server Software is doing some DNS magic (as far as I can tell) to respond to the Sun Rays.

[@LeeZhiWei8219]

Yep! From what I can confirm with wireshark. I think it's either doing broadcast packets for the entire network to discover the server or some sort of multicasting thing. Need to dig deeper haha. FYI my network is a bunch of old Cisco hardware that I got used off the 2nd hand market haha. Planning to get the CCNA as I'm a networking student lol.

[@Nate-hf8hm]

I laughed so hard during the dev stage

[@clabretro]

haha I'm glad

[@primate_0]

I'm absolutely fascinated with these Sun Systems! Keep up the great work!

[@clabretro]

Thanks!

[@haventfoundme]

Nice to see another Sun owner. My v420 finally has a friend 😀

[@matthewsmetalworkshop]

Cool, two Chalupa servers... Back in the day I had one of these as my desktop, via sunray. It was crazy powerful for the time. You should look into the details of the architecture, as the repeater chip these used was very interesting. Jbus was a four point bus, usually allowing 2 jalapenos and two tomatillos. Chalupa used the repeater chip (which I don't recall the name of) which allowed four cpus and four tomatillos, and an enormous amount of memory.

[@clabretro]

Nice! Your comment reminded me I meant to go over all the code names (Chalupa, Enchilada, Jalapeno) but totally forgot (obviously).

[@DarrenPoulson]

Loving these videos. The first 10 years of my career was as a solaris admin. Messed with some very nice machines. Favourite was the 6800 with its partitioning. Stacks of netra X1 too (great for spending that last bit of budget before the next financial year). I got out around the same time that Oracle bought Sun. Can't wait to see what nostalgia road you take me down next!

[@clabretro]

Very cool! Glad you're enjoying it, more to come! (Sun and otherwise)

[@terminalreset7659]

Boy! A blast from the past! You did good!

[@taylorking271]

Great channel I died laughing when you pulled up the AbstractFactoryProxyBean

[@clabretro]

haha thanks

[@JosifovGjorgi]

AbstractFactoryProxyBean is part of Spring Spring is mostly funded by Dell Dell produces big ultrawide screens Maybe Spring developers are the first QA for Dell monitors

[@dirkfromhein]

Love those machines, our production machines were E450s - now those were big. E250s were our dev and QA servers. You could always tell when a big query hit the database, the drive array - a E450 chassis stuffed with ? 300MB drives would cause the whole table to start shaking side to side 😀. Good times… I helped write parts of the EJB 1.0/1.1 spec…

[@clabretro]

Those old Sun Enterprise units were no joke! Which part of the spec? As you can see I'm putting it to good use 😂

[@dirkfromhein]

@@clabretro as I remember section 9.3.1-3? Container managed persistence. I worked with the folks at BEA/Weblogic on integrating ORM products into the way too simplistic a model Sun had for Container managed persistence. Sadly they did not go for our full vision of fine grained persistence containers inside of the rough macro model they had. Though, as an ultimate compliment, they start developing a competing product to our ORM.😀

[@Ratolon]

I just discovered this channel and I have to say I love it!!!! You are amazing, thanks for the videos

[@clabretro]

thanks!

[@brianjrichman]

Oh man! I used to be a sysadmin for a university that used 440's and 880's just like these.

[@tjmbv8680]

I always loved suns design work on there servers, they just got better and better over the years. My favorite were the final generations which looked like something apple would design.

[@clabretro]

Agreed!

[@TheStefanskoglund1]

they had a bit of heat problems with the smalller ones (ie SS1000/SS10/SS20) but a SC 2000 ? (the 20k wasn't a internal sun product but they earned Sun a shitload of money.)

[@DyslexicChris]

My first job was writing code for a humungous J2EE app using Java 1.6. It was a huge monolith that ran many of the UK's public sector pension schemes. It was originally a COBOL application that had been transitioned (somewhat) to J2EE that ran on JBoss. It even had a proprietary Java / COBOL bridge since many of the benefit calculations hadn't changed much since the 80's, so were never ported to Java. We had a yearly release cycle.

[@clabretro]

That's awesome, I love hearing stories like this. I wonder how much of that bad boy lives on!

[@DyslexicChris]

@@clabretro I expect it’s probably still going strong! The system itself was sold for long term support. I remember we were supporting ancient versions of the software that were sold to pension administrators a long time ago. It was one of those systems that organisations bought for big bucks, and that needed to work for the long haul.

[@arizonapalms]

man i am loving your channel - we would totally be friends IRL. retro homelab FTW

[@TomasHajek-h1i]

Am really enjoying this solaris / thin client series you do. I unfortunatly have to administer TC's from Dell runing ThinOS through citrix. It's cool to see how the similair tech worked almost 2 decades ago. Hope there is more to come.

[@clabretro]

Thanks! Yup more stuff on the way.

[@JakeCovey]

15:15 to 17:40 was a work of art

[@HalianTheProtogen]

When those snaps do break, get some plastic glue for miniature models (I personally prefer Citadel brand, but only because I haven't yet been able to try Tamiya Super Thin Model Cement, which I keep getting recommended). It contains acetone, so will melt plastic pieces together in addition to forming a firm physical bond. Source: I play 40k and BattleTech.

[@clabretro]

Oh nice info, thank you! Your credentials are valid haha

[@HalianTheProtogen]

@@clabretro You're welcome

[@CoffeeOnRails]

The more I watch the more I think this would be amazing in places like the NHS. Especially with modern networking you could probably cut deployment costs of workstations. I’ve got friends and family who work in the NHS and they always say the computers are old and broken whereas thin clients would (in theory) allow for so much more power to be just dropped in. Sun was damn cool.

[@clabretro]

Definitely. There are still thin client solutions today from companies like Dell but these Sun Rays just have so much character.

[@TheStefanskoglund1]

In current systems : citrix. The sunray allowed a user to take her desktop with her to the next sunray and so on - at least as long as they were on the same host (but something like this could support hundreds of sunrays.....)

[@youtux2]

This is the coolest crap I've seen in a LOOOONG time. Thanks for sharing! Love it!

[@clabretro]

thanks!

[@karngyan]

Catching up to the 2000s is fun. 🙌

[@CallanChristensen]

I share your amazement that Oracle still maintains these downloads. It makes me wonder why they still host them since it’s not a profit center. Was it part of the acquisition agreement? Are developers in 2023 still needing these tools to rescue old code? Or is it more egotistical, like them showing off their industry-consuming corporate entity treasure chest?

[@clabretro]

My best guess is that there is still a ton of software out there running on these old runtimes. Oracle even still hosts the Sun Ray Server Software, which leads me to believe there are large installations of those out in the wild. My best guess is they have Oracle service contracts? You can still pay Oracle for extended end of life support through January 2025 for Solaris 10.

[@CallanChristensen]

@@clabretro I hope some sysadmins out there who still maintain this stuff reach out. As a Windows admin myself, this stuff is so fascinating.

[@andresbravo2003]

For 20 years, this Server is crazy.

[@McCavity2]

Oh man now I'm really jealous :D Nice catch! I love those Sun Sparc machines I think they're still very much underrated (except among people who had the chance to actually do some work on them). Still lokking to get one for my own, I do have two Sunray 2s lying around, complete with Sun Keyboards and Monitors which I always wanted to set up but never got the chance due to lack of a SunRay server 🙂 I really enjoy watching your videos because it brings back so many memories... keep 'em coming!

[@clabretro]

Thanks! There is a Linux version of the Sun Ray Server Software which might not be too much trouble, but I haven't personally tried it.

[@McCavity2]

I was thinking about setting up a VM running Solaris - but I think it might run into performance issues if I use it for some serious work. But I might as well try, I‘m expecting some beefy IBM Xeon servers to arrive soon, and running SunRay software might be one of the tasks I‘ll assign to them. Still, nothing like Sparc server, though ;-)

[@clabretro]

Nice! Yeah always worth giving it a shot, worst case you get better for the second time you set it up :D

[@lmanstl]

Sun makes some very good looking servers. I prefer the later silver designs but the purple ones look great as well and they really stand out in a rack. I am also a fan of Cisco server design. I bought a sunfire t2000 to play with a while ago but I never got around to getting it fully set up. But I know what I plan on trying now when I finally have some free time to mess with it.

[@thecatofnineswords]

The T2000 can do Logical Domains too, if you want to get seriously complex with the config ^_^

[@clabretro]

Been eyeing those T2000s, they look pretty sweet.

[@lmanstl]

@@clabretro I got a pretty good deal on mine. It was $130 shipped on eBay. It was difficult to find drive caddies and rails though. Unfortunately it is currently just good looking rack filler till I have time to work on setting it up. The other projects currently on my list of things to play with include an HP rp2470 and a Cisco blade system

[@RealEngineer]

Remember seeing this suckers in a purple caged rack. The door had keycard lock on it. And 4 cameras pointing towards this rack from every corner in their room. The sprinkler system was Halon gas. What was they used for? SMS record tracing. And to clarify sms as in a mobile phone text message. The telecom system was heavily Java and sun dependent.

[@clabretro]

ha awesome! Sun actually had a lot of telecom versions (essentially) of the Sun Fires under the Netra line. Makes you wonder how many of those old things are still out there running.

[@massimo79mmm]

very interesting, i bought a sun ultra 5, very particular machine, with its lisp-bios

[@44Bigs]

Looking at Java Application Servers again makes me realise we basically reinvented that whole wheel in the cloud a decade later.

[@bergpolarbear]

"... I'm sure there is someone out there that hasn't seen this in a very long time." *Raises paw* Your channel is so nostalgic for me. Thanks for keeping such memories alive.

[@Gentlemanspot]

Man loving all this sun stuff

[@clabretro]

thanks!

[@benbaselet2026]

Sweet, pretty beefy stuff. I haven't had the pleasure of lifting a 440 but we do have a few 240s and 120s in use. Those hard plastics might become more flexible and less likely to break if you can cook some water into them. I don't know what plastic type those are particularly but often just letting plastic parts sit in hot water for several hours makes them a lot more flexible. Obviously not too hot to melt and deform them, that depends on the exact type of plastic.

[@clabretro]

Oh interesting idea!

[@AureliusR]

@@clabretro I'd recommend a product actually meant for the job, like 303 Protectant. Will help revitalize the plastic, and also make the colour really pop like it's brand new. Just give it a quick wipedown with some soapy water to clean any dirt off, let it dry, spray the 303 on and let it sit for 15-30 mins, then use a dry microfibre type cloth to buff it in. You'll be astounded at how good it makes old plastic look.

[@brycehill4255]

I'm not surprised that there are people maintaining prometheus with solaris. I work in an industrial environment that has lots of old and weird systems from various manufacturers. We use prometheus to track a lot of our systems, and I know for a fact that we have a weird old computer that reads x-ray gauge data that runs solaris on a sparc cpu.

[@dangingerich2559]

Working in IT for nearly 30 years, I have absolutely hated every single Java application I have had to deal with, from FC switch management to storage management, they have always presented problems every time the Java environment is updated. I have VMs with old installs of Windows XP and Java 5 and 7 so I can run those old Java apps that just drive me crazy.

[@clabretro]

Oh yeah it's a pain. I keep XP VMs around for exactly the same reason.

[@bradenmcg]

Is that giant edge connector @7:17 possibly used in the V880s? My alma mater had a bunch of V880s running (IIRC) email, before they got obsolete and moved everything to Google. The V880s are about the size of a mini-fridge, maybe even a bit taller than that. I kinda wonder if a V880 is just several 440s connected to an even larger "masterboard" or something...

[@AnnatarTheMaia]

I just finished packaging the latest Opus codec on Solaris 10 not 15 minutes ago. I need it for OpenAl, which I need for the fs-uae Amiga emulator. I have tons of modern software packaged and running on Solaris 10. Runs like a champ and is really fast.

[@ainlLeek]

The Sun Java System Application Server lives on in Glassfish (it's modern incarnation), but I prefer a fork of that, Payara, for Java web development.

[@BAgodmode]

I love the text progress stuff, fits the Unix aesthetic. I’m a sucker for Unix. What could have been,

[@JapanPop]

I have been waiting for your vids like a fiend! Yes!!🎉😊

[@chrisis429]

Free Beer and servers? Sweet deal!

[@clabretro]

Can't complain!

[@subynut]

This was fun! Really enjoyed it!

[@clabretro]

Glad you enjoyed it!

[@csudsuindustries]

I would say, you don’t know what a long post could be. I use to admin small sun4m systems to the e10k and netra ft 1800. When the diag-switch? Was set to true we would boot, take a long lunch with beer. By the time we roll back in to the office we would be at the ok prompt. Standard operating procedure was to make sure it was set to false before we did an init 6 for production systems.

[@clabretro]

I meant to follow up in the second half of the video, I of course did a "setenv diag-level off" and then we were cruising.

[@lpseem3770]

Ear and war files are still used today in a Wildfly applications. They are like a containers, before they were cool.

[@Bromon655]

Lol that coding montage was solid gold

[@clabretro]

haha thanks

[@nemoe]

Can't wait when you'll try something like SunFire 6800 :)

[@lctsi]

I always wanted to write some software for the Sun MAJC processors. Quite a bit ahead of its time.

[@bdfoxfire]

Worked in HW development for SUN / Oracle at the UTC ( San Diego ) from 1998 till 2019. If you think these toys are big you should check out the Starfire E10K and starcat F25 systems. Over time loss a lot of my hearing to the start up fan speed .

[@larbob]

If you plug both PSUs in, it'll quiet the fans down some! Used to have one of these guys. :)

[@clabretro]

Interesting, I'll have to try that out!

[@zacharyschwanke7160]

now develop an os using java

[@AnonyDave]

It's kinda funny to see the evolution of the sun stuff. One day I'll document some of the shit I have. Having the LOM on a separate card is something that came across from the 280r, which had a very similar card, but the ones I have also have a modem built into them (well, sorta built in, it's a pcmcia modem on it). But then it had fun stuff like needing a torque wrench (actually provided with the server) to properly torque down the cpu boards. That was similar to the ultra 80 and e420r, as they needed a torque wrench (also provided) for half their memory. One of these days videos like this will stop unlocking old almost forgotten memories 😆

[@hamisgulyas]

that's a flippin' awesome channel!

[@clabretro]

thanks!

[@Space_Reptile]

i see that NABU in the back, when are we gonna see a vid on that obscurity?

[@clabretro]

I was wondering if someone would notice (wasn't my plan though haha). You may have inspired me, there are a lot of videos on it but maybe I'll do one of my own.

[@Space_Reptile]

@@clabretro i would love to see a setup that brings it back to life and demos some possibly self written software on it, as getting software on it is a bit obscure and what im honestly most interested in

[@clabretro]

There's a big ecosystem actually, www.youtube.com/@DJSures and www.youtube.com/@leo.binkowski have a ton of stuff about the NABUs. I might do a video.

[@Space_Reptile]

@@clabretro late reply as i was busy watching a bunch of NABU videos, i was unaware how much work has gotten into getting the plattform back and online

[@clabretro]

​@@Space_Reptile oh yeah it's incredible, amazing work being done.

[@MartyTuro]

Man Sun was such a cool & interesting company, almost makes me want to get into coding. almost.

[@clabretro]

don't do it

[@MartyTuro]

@@clabretro yessir 🫡

[@JohnKiniston]

Ok at 23:30 you do something fun with 4 terminals at once, is that using tmux? I’ve used pdsh to run jobs in parallel across multiple servers but not like you did there.

[@clabretro]

Yup! tmux with "setw synchronize-panes on"

[@johnibsuser6723]

Nice to see someone else running Debian on SPARC. I've been experimenting with debian12 and mdadm (no ZFS, sigh) on Sun T1000 and T2000. Not much of a choice there since FreeBSD 12.4 does not support Niagara cpus

[@chaseohara4781]

I saw that NABU hiding in the background 😂

[@clabretro]

haha oh yeah. I'll probably need to make a video on that

[@onGlobalproductions]

Its my favorite sparc rack server, also my fist one

[@clabretro]

it's quickly becoming a favorite of mine as well!

[@ellienore]

I'm very curious if you put a PCI graphics card adapter in it if it would post on a screen, rather than the serial connection.

[@clabretro]

It can! And Sun even threw in some special graphics when the OpenBoot PROM is configured to output to a video card. I'll cover that in a future video!

[@onGlobalproductions]

@@clabretrosetenv output-device display serenv input-device keyboard

[@elesjuan]

That was cool. I'm sitting over here trying to figure out what you could populate a large DB table with easily and query the heck out of... Unfortunately I'm drawing a blank. Anyway, looking forward to seeing what you end up doing with these!

[@clabretro]

Thanks!

[@explosivehotdogs]

I think server hardware back in the day was aesthetically much cooler than stuff currently. See: SGI, DEC AlphaServer, Apple XServe, etc. Wonder why the cool colors and shapes went away...

[@ianjamesevans]

Heh. I wrote a good chunk of the EJB docs you showed.

[@clabretro]

Ha no way, that's amazing! They're still being put to good use as you can see 😆

[@brettgmonroe]

To note, no one payed list price on these things. "List" price was (and still is) just a scheme to make managers feel good about themselves when they "put the screws to the dealer" to get a better price. But don't get me wrong, Sun's enterprise servers still weren't cheap. Sadly, the "V" line of the SunFire range were Sun's continued attempt to stanch the bleeding of cheap x86 servers. They led to cost cutting and it showed in the build quality of those things. I can't tell you how many daughter boards failed on me over the years I managed Sun gear (or how easily that plastic fascia broke off. And don't get me started on the COMICAL lock they put on those things.

[@clabretro]

That's a really good call out, list price is probably too simple of an analysis, given there at least would've been things like volume discounts. Would you say the earlier Sun Enterprise range were higher quality? Generally speaking I've been impressed with the V series quality except for exactly as you point out - some comically bad plastic components. My V120 face plate is basically unusable.

[@brettgmonroe]

@@clabretro TBH, it was a mixed bag. Their "original" `E` line of Sparc II (and later Sparc III) were amazing (E3000 - E15K) but that was also pretty early in my career so I may be remembering them with some rose-tinted glasses. The R line (280R & 480R) were also pretty solid (and as an aside, if you think the V440 takes a long time to POST, those suckers, on full diag, would take forever and a day.....like over half an hour with all CPUs and memory populated....to get to the ok> prompt), though they too had some pretty cheap plastic fascia. Their later M-line that they "collaborated" with Fujitsu on were also pretty amazing but sadly too little too late as they sold themselves to Oracle not long after.

[@hessex1899]

I have dozens of these still running at work. Some of them have uptimes > 4k days.

[@capability-snob]

J2EE didn't really have capabilities, despite what the documentation says. They weren't far off - you can get pretty close, but reflection like Class.forName is a pretty clear violation of capability patterns. There was a project called Joe-E at some point that attempted to slightly modify Java into a capability system and provide a fairly sensible taming of the EE libraries.

[@caprature]

i wonder if it can take 2gb ecc dimms for a total of 32gb.

[@clabretro]

I think theoretically you can get up to 32gb

[@JeffreyJohnsonC]

First time I replaced one of those CPUs live I was nervous as heck.

[@clabretro]

I've got some coming for that other unit, should be interesting.

[@borlibaer]

right, You'll need a FC StorEdge 3500 and Oracle 10g ... switches and everything twin paired for high availability ... ;-)

[@clabretro]

Ha I've got a StorEdge S1 I need to do a video on. Looks just like the Sun Fire v120.

[@gastonhitw720]

I wonder, who used solaris as a OS and for development, seeing how hard it is to make this type of systems work makes me think that these engineers and developers were superhuman....or very patient people

[@christopherjackson2157]

What would you run on a netra t5220 ... totally asking for a friend... It's got a ton of threads (but they're slow af) And it's got tons of high-speed networking (but it's pciX) I have been meaning to learn kubernetes....

[@clabretro]

Throw anything on there! Those seem like cool machines.

[@matthewstott3493]

One day, you may obtain a Sun thumper X4500 or double it with an X4540 model (code-named Thor). Powered by ZFS and SSD caching. Could do object-store with big compute on the data within.

[@clabretro]

Those things are beasts. I have a Sun Fire X2200.

[@boardernut]

Sadly they also have a boring x86 architecture

[@MazeFrame]

I wish I was around when stuff like this was put into production. Makes me feel like I missed on the era before the cloud-BS-license-hellscape we are in today.

[@clabretro]

Agreed, a pain in some ways but much more fun in others.

[@RoyHess666]

You know, you could always keep a couple seconds of the actual noise level of the server, so we can hear the original noise

[@clabretro]

I've been thinking about doing that, I might add that the next time I film a server.

[@kungfujesus06]

Project darkstar might be a fun thing to make it sweat. Certainly more interesting than enterprise net beans, anyway.

[@clabretro]

That is very interesting... I hadn't heard of project darkstar before. I'll be doing more research on that for sure!