Sun Microsystems SPARCstation 5/SPARCserver 5 (From 1994) - Tour and Look Inside!

[@walter0bz]

When all computers were pizza boxes , i wanted a tower. Now that all computers are towers, pizza-boxes look awesome

[@mestrebimbashouse]

I dont think pizza boxes look as pretty as towers tbh

[@CrisisGuildWOW]

The build quality of Sun Sparc was lightyears beyond their times, hence the price. The Sparc 10's and 20's were even more powerful and refined than the 5's of course. I used to do admin work on them back in the mid 90's. I still have an SS10, SS20, and an Ultra 5 in the basement that all still work to this day. Every once in a while I'll dust them off and fire em up for old times sake. Nothing made today has the same quality even tho they are hopelessly outdated. They still facinate me even today.

[@MightyNostromo]

Love the pizza box form factor of these Sparcstations. Nice little overview.

[@keithgray5525]

I used to work on these when I started out as a Unix consultant....a thousand years ago .....we had one as a print server.. It is amazing people collect these, we must have recycled hundreds of these back in the day.

[@sshaw37]

I have an old sun ultra 5. I bought it out of nostalgia having used sin workstations in an old job. Unfortunately my misses chucked the keyboard and I took out the power supply for my dads pc and the ha was used for something g else. Watching this really makes me want to get it up and running!

[@Xpurple]

I used one of these for a workstation for years. Loved it.

[@wysoft]

I remember when I bought my old SS5 used some time around 2000. Even though it was pretty slow by that time compared to commodity PC hardware, you could still get on the web and do useful stuff with it, and that's what I did. Those days are long past and unfortunately so is my old SS5.

[@burtholiday1573]

Thanks for making these videos, I always wondered what those high end unix systems were like.

[@saoirseocathain2429]

watching this video in one window while bootstrapping pkgsrc on our (sadly virtual) SPARCstation-5 running Solaris 9 9/05 in another. perfect

[@larryparks1520]

Nice. I worked with a bunch like this at Honeywell, 2000-2008. And a few Cray's, too. They were obsolete, and being sold off for a couple bucks, lol.

[@VK2FVAX]

So.. in the OBP, when the NVRAM battery goes fut, it flips back to default a few of the environment variables (not just MAC (which was actually there on yours..?) and checksum). run "printenv" to see them. Check the variables "mfg-switch?" and "diag-switch". Flip them and watch how much faster it boots and all the manufacturing and diagnostics it won't run thinking it's got issues. If you're unfamiliar with other OBP commands and want a listing, type "sifting words". You should also be able to change the default boot order from "net" to "disk" whilst your in there. Nice tour :) Good on you.

[@philiplishman532]

The Bt chip (the ramdac) is made by Brooktree. They also did colour lookup table chips (palette memory).

[@FranklinChou]

Wow the `ok` prompt drops you into manually setting bit registers in memory?!

[@HikikomoriDev]

Love the industrial design... It's beige but it's got that lavender accent too... both beautiful

[@matthiasmartin1975]

Ah, my first contact with UNIX back in 1998. Although the SparcStations we had at school had the fancy CDE stuff on them.

[@SudosFTW]

you can get an 8-pack of Sun X7022A/501-2653 RAM sticks, clip the middle notch wider, and stick it in the RAM slots just fine to allow it to get 256MB. These are for the 3500/4500/5500 and 6500 systems and I believe the StarFire also used these DIMMs. Internal pic of my SS5 running with all 8 sticks populated: pbs.twimg.com/media/CZ07eAeWEAAX2VS.jpg:large ...with extra cooling on the 110MHz MicroSPARC II, a fan from a dead 8800GTS GPU schlepped on top to promote wider air circulation to the drive bay, because yes, I have a 10k drive in there. 18GB, with a hard drive fan screwed to the bottom taking up the second drive bay slot to keep it decently cool. and, extra heatsinking on the HappyMeal card in the middle Sbus slot, which has recently died and needs to be replaced due to my own error when doing some internal cleaning. one of the address pins _might_ _have_ touched 12v and I don't think the main chip on there was very happy about that. :/ and a screenshot of it running Debian Etch with the stock kernel before I moved back to a custom compiled 2.4.37.11 kernel: pbs.twimg.com/media/ChRKu-4WUAQ_Cl4.jpg:orig I recently had my NVRAM battery die after 22 years of life (the reason I opened it up and cleaned it, and killed the HappyMeal card.) I've done a couple of battery replacements just using sealed replacements for Thinkpads because they're pretty much the cheapest ones you can get where the batteries already have leads on them, and it's a bunch less work to solder the ends on than hotsnotting a battery socket and some wires in, in my opinion. others will say the opposite, but I'm just saying what's worked for me the best. it's good to note that the numbers on your NVRAM on the yellow label are actually the last digits of your MAC Address and Host ID. those will come in handy when you finally do the NVRAM battery hack, else you can find information on actually acquiring a new compatible chip for VERY cheap on the internets. Debian works fine on these if you don't mind compiling newer versions of some things, but in all actuality, NetBSD booted via the network for an install or OpenBSD from a CD-ROM drive install are the easiest to set up, just don't expect anything from them graphically. in fact, my suggestion is to never use these graphically with anything unless it's SunOS or Slow-aris, or you magically acquire an expensive ZX framebuffer to stick in two of the Sbus slots. the AFX slot apparently had a card, but no one on the internet at least has ever seen one out in the wild. to install Debian, one has to install Debian Woody first, then go through a painful upgrade to Sarge (since Sarge and Etch won't CDROM boot on Sun4m machines because of an ESP SCSI driver bug), and then finally Etch, but you can only use the 2.4 kernel from Sarge to boot the thing. the 2.6 kernel makes the machine 'oops' a kernel panic after enumerating the SCSI bus, also because of the aforementioned ESP driver bug. There was one gentleman in the #gentoo-sparc channel on Freenode that was making Gentoo installation media for Sparc32 machines, but I don't think it's gotten anywhere in a while. There have been successful installs of Gentoo with very stripped 3.x kernels on the machine, somethign that will hopefully change later on as kernel 4.x matures and one can chainload a bigger kernel into memory from a smaller one-- the kernel size has to be below 2.something megs or else the system will NOT boot it, due to the older OpenPROM version. you can network-boot Etch, however, and do a clean install that way, but it all depends on if you're able to set up the network properly to make that happen, and don't mind the 10Mbit speeds of the inbuilt AMD Lance ethernet chipset to do so. on a much lighter note, I wasn't aware the F1703 was sync-on-green capable. I'll have to remember that when I swap out mine for something else on my desk sometime soon.

[@camerongray1515]

Awesome! May look into upgrading the RAM/CPU or adding some SBus cards if I can find any cheap. I'll probably hold off on the NVRAM battery fix for now as I'd rather have a working machine with a dead NVRAM battery than risk breaking everything! If I see a cheap (even if dead) NVRAM chip or can get my hands on a dead SS5 I'd consider it since I'd have a spare chip on hand. When I first got this machine it was running Debian (as was all the other Sun hardware I have as it all came from a project that exclusively ran Debian on these - www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/). I tend to stick the original OSs back on them though, I don't have a practical use for a SPARC machine so for me I'd rather have an unusual/different OS like SunOS or Solaris rather than Debian which I use day in day out on most of my machines! Not sure about the Sync-on-green - As far as I was aware the SS5 outputs separate Horizontal and Composite sync signals. On the other hand, my NeXTstation Turbo Color outputs Sync-on-green and the F1703 (along with all my other monitors) refuse to come out of sleep, I had to build a sync separator using an LM1881 chip to separate the sync from the green video signal into separate horizontal and composite sync components. I explain this and show the adaptor I made in my NeXTstation video here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/r4qXaH2EhZlga5Ym38s

[@SudosFTW]

it might all depend on the framebuffer used, but I know a lot of monitors will not work with newer Sun framebuffers because of a Sync on Green issue. yeah, I commented on the Ultra 5 video and saw the Tardis project videos a while ago. I was very sad when Debian dropped support for SPARC64 in Jessie, and even sadder this past month when they stopped providing security updates for anything but i386/amd64/armel/armhf for wheezy-lts. meaning, I'm probably never going to see another update for SPARC64 come out for Wheezy for a long time yet if ever until they get SPARC64 back on track in Stretch, as it seems they are in the mailing list, bickering amongst themselves to finish getting an installable system from CD happening in time aside from the bugs still needing to be worked out. the drop from official port status to the likes of where m68k now stands is what brought this about, and I can't wait for there to be Linux support on modern kernels again. but because I'm one of those luddites that can't stand systemd, I've been waiting for Devuan to go stable so to pester the devs once again to dust off their old UltraSPARC hardware to get the port going. if they beat out Debian in getting a working, stable distro out for SPARC64, it's going to make some pretty big headlines in the Linux news world for sure, aside from the fact that one can still install Gentoo on the things just fine sans-systemd. the SS5 has been running Etch for about a year straight. in that time I've been gradually hardening the system up so to protect it from outside attacks, since it does have an ssh port facing outbound on a non-standard port. authfail is helpful here, fail2ban on much more powerful hardware, but I've been dragging my feet on compiling newer openssh binaries for giggles. it takes many, many hours to compile things on the box natively. last biggest compile was LibreSSL, which compiles perfectly on Etch whereas normal OpenSSL does not, and GnuTLS has some issues where it won't compile, so LibreSSL for TLS traffic it is. I've been thinking lately about selling the SS5 however, since I need the money more than I need the chuckles at the current moment in time. with 256MB of RAM and the RAM hack I provided not well known at all, I could probably fetch a fancy sum for the unit.

[@litebkt]

I bought a Sparc 5 workstation new back in the day so I could “take my work home” back in the day.

[@christophermatthews638]

I don´t have one of these Sun workstations but I have been in the electronics a good few years and can recall NVRAM´s combined with a real time clock that look identical to the one in your machine. They are made by Dallas Semiconductor which I believe may have become Maxim. Its probably worth checking them out. They may be obsolete but worth having a look.

[@dronejunglistplatoon]

Just discovered your channel today and I fucking love it! Great job! Big up!!

[@bamdadkhan]

not that i don't enjoy the network stuff, but i really miss videos like this.

[@camerongray1515]

Don't worry, I still have loads of retro machines I need to go through, there's just been various other networking/project/review stuff that keeps cropping up so it gets priority since this sort of stuff can be filmed any time at no cost whereas other stuff is usually me doing something for myself and happening to film it at the same time.

[@Major_Mason]

I am green with envy that you have ANYTHING from Sun Microsystems...

[@michaeltsung9741]

Awesome..... always liked the keyboards on these.....

[@itsGeorgeAgain]

God i *HATE* those nv chips with batteries in them. Have 2 Suns that won't work because of the nvram. Guess i need to find some keys and solder some batteries?

[@jeremyrebelka]

You can buy those chips - they are still manufactured sometimes under slightly different model number - good thing is you can program them manually from of prompt - date,MAC,SN - and you ready to go for another 25 years... I have recently ordered couple for my IPX and SS20 - 3new ones for each - should have me covered till I die :D

[@itsGeorgeAgain]

Hm. have a link to the place?

[@jeremyrebelka]

many places sell them - I used to buy from different places in the past try this: www.memoryxsun.com - they still offer parts - I purchased ram for SS20 - newold stock warks great. for the SS20 the chip I needed was M48T08-100PC1 28pin 100ns IDPROM (p/n 525-1378). Not sure which is needed for ss5 - check yours its printed on the chip - access timing is really important especially the older machines like SSIPX were wery sensitive and some faster chips did not work. I'm sure people at memoryx will help you - ask them if you are not sure. Also if you need programinf instructions ping me - I can explain how to do it.

[@itsGeorgeAgain]

Awesome! thanks.

[@jeremyrebelka]

here also -just make sure you get the right one: uk.rs-online.com/web/p/nvram-memory-chips/1892412/

[@zedalert]

Wow, perfect case for a flat SFF PC, with an ITX motherboard and three slots GPU.

[@ap06476]

Nostalgia...: I used to work at Sun Microsystems and support those ;-)

[@Hey-bz8is]

Same 😃

[@yjk_music]

Shutdown process seems kinda complicated, although modern linux is not much different(but we have "sudo", which makes process simpler). But it seems weired that you have to type shutdown commands twice...(One from shell, and one from ok prompt)

[@thepoliticalstartrek]

I had a L5 server with full cpu cards. It was pretty cool. Only odd thing is it's drives were in RAID 3 array. I assume it was for rendering large files. As thats the only thing RAID 3 is useful for.

[@liljames2k]

Beautiful!

[@daveb5041]

Thats super easy to shut down just 10 commands and one password. Very user friendly.

[@seveNGus]

That is because you should never shut down a server, since it is an unforgivable sin! ;)

[@simontay4851]

Write a script to run the commands automatically.

[@daveb5041]

Yes all I will need to do that is a sun server and to learn linux.

[@CrisisGuildWOW]

lol you clown. These machines were designed for multi-user, high end business work. 99% were ran 24/7/365. To compare them to your Winblowz desktop is like comparing cabernet sauvignon to kool-aide. Stay inside your Microsoft captive environment. Its the right place for you.

[@dorquemadagaming3938]

Those "mkp" commands you used for booting the machine - it this FORTH of some sort? Do you have more explanatory sources on this?

[@vraiverifiableinvisiblekta2887]

instead of loginroot you could have issued su - then halt :-) or simply used a role and su halt (wich was common this era) define default shell to be /sbin/halt to the user halt , then login as halt :-)

[@ThomasCouey]

I find "init 5" to be the easiest way to power off.

[@jamesrbrindle]

Whats the model number of that battery chip? I have to source all sorts of oddball battery and rtc nvram chips for arcade games let me know as that boot sequence is definitely for us uber geeks. I don't know very much about Sun Sparc systems - very interested in their history though.

[@b3ntleg]

So what is the name of the environment where you were inputting the MAC address?

[@camerongray1515]

It's the OpenBoot shell, OpenBoot being the firmware that runs on the machine instead of a regular BIOS or EFI system.

[@rumjar1986]

what could you use this for now apart from heating a room? Just curious.

[@camerongray1515]

+Josh Rumjar Pretty much nothing to be honest. I mean, you could still use it as a basic server although it wouldn't be worth it due to the power consumption. The only time these would really be used nowadays would be for running legacy applications that are tied to the hardware.

[@rumjar1986]

Cameron Gray cheers for the reply. I actually used to work with some of the old terminals when I left high school. The server was to say the least was huge and weighed a ton. The good thing is sun didn't skip on the good quality caster wheels lol. On another note, love ya videos, keep them coming.

[@simontay4851]

Maybe use it as a NAS server.

[@PinguimFU]

i guess not even that since this machine only has 10 mbit LAN and the 10/100 was a expensive addon card

[@CrisisGuildWOW]

They cant compare to modern computing of course. Its more of the nostalgia and experience of the past. Its kinda like when ppl appreciate old cars and the way they were built and run. Classic-Computing if you will.

[@aguilacero]

how i can see the netcard. i wrote ifconfig and only appers "lo".

[@Boemel]

I found a free ultra 10 with 486mhz and 756MB of ram and built in ati rage pro, its a cool little thing but im trying to figure out a way to make it show google ... :D but cant even find a solaris 8 iso ... it does boot up tho, i installed ubuntu 7 but cant find a gui for it.

[@runforit420]

Is that actually Open Firmware on startup?

[@camerongray1515]

It is yes, Sun just calls it OpenBoot.

[@Storm_.]

Cameron, just FYI I think this machine looks like it uses the same NVRAM as an Atari Falcon. If you go to www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari/last/storenew/ You could purchase a replacement Falcon NVRAM which uses a coin-cell battery. This might work.

[@AndyMcClements]

Hi Cameron, I have spare new/unused SS5 internal CD-ROM if you still need one. In the UK and can post it.

[@matsf8268]

Who's watching 2019? I used to work with these, forgot about Stop-A :D Employee #23244

[@EvertvanIngen]

POWER-ON @ 9:28 ;)

[@VAX1970]

Dust that video card, it's full of vintage fluff!

[@pklongutoobe]

I was kinda depressing when I first got to use a workstation how limited they were compared to IBM PC's!

[@kelli217]

That was a heck of an opening. “This video, umgahtelukma Sun SPARCstation 5.”

[@yallaworld1575]

How to I join

[@leocomerford]

3:36 Have you tried the superglue-and-baking-soda method? kzbin.info/www/bejne/pGLQlqKQlq2MkNE

[@HPPalmtopTube]

yuck!!! openlook! the ugliest UI ever made ;) you can see it was designed by programmers only... In the early 2000's when everyone was using CDE on solaris 2.6-7-8-9 at my office there was one asian supergeek who always chose openwindows when logging in. It was his "thing".

[@boltar2003]

He's touching an awful lot of internal components and isn't wearing an earthing strip. Talk about asking for trouble.

[@DocMacLovin]

holy f* i can hardly understand that accent - try english please

[@jtsotherone]

I'm an *english* speaker and I understand it just fine, try listening better please.