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I need to rationalise my SPARC machines, so where better to start than with an inventory? I need to see if I can get rid of some of these, because we have to move house soon, and right now we have a big basement. I can't count on having that much room going forward.
I used this for several years as my daily Sun workstation at home. I implemented my first OpenGL component on this machine, which eventually got ported to Windows, and with massive further development can be seen from the Bloomberg function "OVDV" (click on "3d graph").
I find that raw compute performance of the Ultra 10 machine is not bad - that's a 2MB cache cpu. Also graphics are quite good with the Elite card. Not as snappy at 2D as a Creator card, or certainly modern PC cards. I/O performance just BLOWS, however, with the default hard disk and cd-rom.
This machine came with a near-identical "twin" off ebay (same auction) that I set up for a friend - Solaris 8, forte 6.2, 13w3 adapter, the lot. I took it to the Mailboxes shop nearby and shipped it to London for him. Phew, that was heavy! He paid me back in full. Sadly, he never even unpacked it. That other machine is called "feanor"...
This was a "trophy" machine really. I spent way too much buying this little charmer off Ebay. I had a SPARC20 at Goldman Sachs when I used to work there, so this does have some nostalgia value. I used it as a jumpstart server for a while, but it's really quite slow, and it puts off a lot of heat and sometimes a whiff of hot metal smell, and is also noisy. I have some photos of when it arrived here. The "console funnies" were amusing (odd graphics effects when it switches from X11 back to OBP prompt).
My current jumpstart server. Performs very well, and does not put off too much heat (at least with the unscientific "put hand near air vent" test). I put a SCSI DVD-ROM in it. Works fine.
This was also my first Solaris 10 machine. I attempted to do something interesting with zones and multiple NICs with this card, but I ran across a bug in the then-current version of Solaris 10 and gave up for the time being. I need to get back to that idea (future blog ahoy).
This was fun for a while. It has no graphics so I had to hook up the serial console to a serial port on my Ultra 10. Getting Solaris 8 to install on this was "interesting". It couldn't bring up its NIC when it booted off disk whatsoever. Someone had done a reinstall of Solaris 2.6 (IIRC) and been naughty and not tested it, clearly they'd missed some required stuff. Anyway, I put in a SunSwift card I happened to have (NIC+SCSI) and it -nearly- got on the network (the link went up and down once and then stayed down). However when I broke into OBP and then continued, it finally worked it out. The official solution was to use the platform CD ... which of course one tends not to get with Ebay purchases. There is some bug with CPU speeds over a certain level (227 mhz maybe?)and that version of Solaris. Anyway once I managed to get it on the network, I net booted Solaris 8 and it was fine. Performance is good, but rackmount cases have obnoxiously loud fans. I planned to gut it and rebuild into a quiet case but never got around to it.
I used this for several months. I had to fit some SCA-II SCSI disks to it as it came stripped. The RAID controller has an LCD screen and also a serial port. There was a quad Zynix NIC in it which didn't seem to work, and the built-in NIC was also flaky. Currently it has my SunSwift card in it. I also used a spare Creator3D UPA card in it for a while. Once again the dreaded noise aspect limits the fun. I plan to rip out the good stuff and use it in the AXi rebuild project.
This is what I have at work. It's a very nice machine. Built like a tank. Good performance. Firewire, USB, Fiber Channel, SCSI. Fairly quiet, PCI environment monitoring built-in - it's really a "proper server" in a workstation case - the E280R has exactly the same motherboard. The CPUs come on daughter boards which have to be carefully fitted and then tightened into place using a (provided) torque wrench. Complete beast to move around.
This machine can put off a tremendous amount of heat when it runs flat out, but it also has clock speed switching to limit power dissipation under low load, so it's still Energy Star qualified.
Prices on these machines finally dropped recently. Firstly there is now a steady supply of newer Sun Blade 1500, 2000 and 2500 workstations on Ebay which limit how much the older machine can go for. The 1500 and 2500 have a much more suitable workstation processor, the UltraSPARC-IIIi, however they are still relatively new and costly. I have a 2500 at work also, it kicks ass, but overall it's not quite as special as the 1000. The SB2000 might be good too, but I find it doesn't look as nice for some reason.
The SB1000, after all, has the unique illuminated Sun logo - you should be able to make it out here.
This is my Solaris 10 desktop machine. If I do any more home-based Solaris development, this is where I'll do it.
I'm going to finish with the output of one of my favourite commands on SPARC/Solaris. The prtdiag command has special knowledge of the hardware of the machine that is running it, as long as it's called via the correct, hardware dependent path under /var/platform. This includes hardware details such as number, type, cache size of the cpus, graphics cards, bus adapters etc - even CPU temperature. One thing that disappointed me with recent changes in Solaris is this command stopped printing precise temperatures, because it was giving customers too much to think about, and instead only prints "okay" if the temps are within the acceptable ranges.
One of the things that Open Solaris will allow is "fixing" issues like this - I will be able to have my own version of this command, for example.
I hope that when Sun does full-strength AMD based server designs, this kind of valuable utility will be supported (and similar monitoring hardware will be provided) on the x86 side of the reservation.
Note : one doesn't even have to muck about with switch statements to work out which machine scripts are, just use uname - see the following :-
bash-3.00$ /usr/platform/`uname -i`/sbin/prtdiag -v
System Configuration: Sun Microsystems sun4u SUNW,Sun-Blade-1000 (2 X UltraSPARC-III)
System clock frequency: 150 MHZ
Memory size: 2GB
==================================== CPUs ====================================
E$ CPU CPU
CPU Freq Size Implementation Mask Status Location
--- -------- ---------- ------------------- ----- ------ --------
0 750 MHz 8MB SUNW,UltraSPARC-III 5.4 on-line +-board/cpu0
1 750 MHz 8MB SUNW,UltraSPARC-III 5.14 on-line +-board/cpu1
================================= IO Devices =================================
Bus Freq Slot + Name +
Type MHz Status Path Model
---- ---- ---------- ---------------------------- --------------------
pci 33 +s/system-board ebus/ns87317-ecpp (parallel)
okay /pci@8,700000/ebus@5/parallel
pci 33 +s/system-board ebus/se (serial)
okay /pci@8,700000/ebus@5/serial
pci 33 +s/system-board pci108e,1101 (network) SUNW,pci-eri
okay /pci@8,700000/network@5,1
pci 33 +s/system-board pciclass,0c0010 (firewire)
okay /pci@8,700000/firewire@5,2
pci 33 +s/system-board scsi-pci1000,f (scsi-2)
okay /pci@8,700000/scsi
pci 33 +s/system-board scsi-pci1000,f (scsi-2)
okay /pci@8,700000/scsi
pci 66 +s/system-board SUNW,qlc-pci1077,2200 (scsi-+
okay /pci@8,600000/SUNW,qlc@4
upa 120 +em-board/J4501 SUNW,ffb (display) SUNW,501-4788
okay /upa@8,480000/SUNW,ffb@0,0
upa 120 +em-board/J3501 SUNW,ffb (display) SUNW,501-4788
okay /upa@8,480000/SUNW,ffb@1,0
============================ Memory Configuration ============================
Segment Table:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Base Address Size Interleave Factor Contains
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
0x0 2GB 4 BankIDs 0,1,2,3
Bank Table:
-----------------------------------------------------------
Physical Location
ID ControllerID GroupID Size Interleave Way
-----------------------------------------------------------
0 0 0 512MB 0
1 0 1 512MB 1
2 0 0 512MB 2
3 0 1 512MB 3
Memory Module Groups:
--------------------------------------------------
ControllerID GroupID Labels Status
--------------------------------------------------
0 0 chassis/system-board/J0100
0 0 chassis/system-board/J0202
0 0 chassis/system-board/J0304
0 0 chassis/system-board/J0406
0 1 chassis/system-board/J0101
0 1 chassis/system-board/J0203
0 1 chassis/system-board/J0305
0 1 chassis/system-board/J0407
=============================== usb Devices ===============================
Name Port#
------------ -----
keyboard 3
mouse 4
============================ Environmental Status ============================
Fan Status:
---------------------------------------
Location Sensor Status
---------------------------------------
+stem-fan-slot system-fan okay
+/cpu-fan-slot cpu-fan okay
+r-supply-slot power-supply okay
---------------------------------------
Temperature sensors:
------------------------------------
Location Sensor Status
------------------------------------
+em-board/cpu0 Die okay
+em-board/cpu0 Ambient okay
+em-board/cpu1 Die okay
+em-board/cpu1 Ambient okay
================================ HW Revisions ================================
ASIC Revisions:
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Path Device Status Revision
-------------------------------------------------------------------
/pci@8,700000 pci108e,8001 okay 5
/pci@8,600000 pci108e,8001 okay 5
/pci@8,700000/ebus@5 ebus okay 1
System PROM revisions:
----------------------
OBP 4.5.10 2002/02/11 10:38
POST 4.5.9 2002/02/05 21:25
bash-3.00$