What to do with a Sun Sunfire T2000 server?

JWJones · 02-06-2018, 01:08 PM

So I was gifted a 10+ year old Sun Sunfire T2000 (2U) server w/ 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC T1, 8 GB RAM, 4 x 72GB HDD. Beautiful piece of hardware, it fires up and all, no OS on it, though.

What to do with it? Uses a lot of power, makes a lot of noise, but seems like it would make some kind of cool project. Or not. Maybe a room heater? A boat anchor?

Just wondering. Anyone else sitting on old Sun hardware that they're actually using?

fatmac · 02-07-2018, 05:57 AM

There are a couple of Open Source 'Solaris' type Operating Systems if you search online, otherwise, I'd check out one of the BSD versions; I'm not sure if Linux will run on it, haven't read much about Linux on Sun equipment.
Edit: Some Linux will - http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/sy...s-1544128.html

I think all servers will produce a lot of heat & noise, it's what keeps them able to run 24/7 without a hitch.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/0...rrects_omnios/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos

kebabbert · 02-07-2018, 06:07 AM

The T2000 has great throughput. I can handle many light threads, for instance webserver. One company replaced fifty (50) x86 dual core 2.4GHz webservers with one T2000 back in the days. Each thread is very weak, but they are many. So if you have anything light threaded serving many customers, then T2000 is great.

syg00 · 02-07-2018, 06:12 AM

Boat anchor.
Lost cause - ditch it.

Cost of power will never again reduce. I use pi3 for this very reason. And the (lack of) noise of course too.
I have a bunch of old kit I will never power-on again.

JWJones · 02-07-2018, 07:31 AM

Thanks for the answers, folks. It's a shame, really, as this thing is a beautiful piece of hardware.

Quote:

Originally Posted by kebabbert

The T2000 has great throughput. I can handle many light threads, for instance webserver. One company replaced fifty (50) x86 dual core 2.4GHz webservers with one T2000 back in the days. Each thread is very weak, but they are many. So if you have anything light threaded serving many customers, then T2000 is great.

kebabbert, I see that you are running a Solaris variant, can I ask which one? I am experimenting with OpenSolaris 2009.6 on some old hardware at work, but I am finding that OpenIndiana will not boot on my Dell Optiplex 980 at home. Is this because of UEFI, or...? Any way around this?

kebabbert · 02-07-2018, 09:09 AM

I am running Oracle Solaris 11.3. If you want to run open source, there are several alternatives listed here:
https://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/Distributions

It seems that OpenIndiana and OmniOS are quite popular. The latest OpenIndiana was released just a couple of months ago:
https://www.openindiana.org/overview...ipster-branch/

OmniOS has been supersceeded by OmniOS Community Edition:
https://wiki.illumos.org/display/illumos/Distributions

I suggest you try one of these newer version of OpenSolaris on your Dell pc and see if it works better?

JWJones · 02-07-2018, 09:40 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kebabbert

I suggest you try one of these newer version of OpenSolaris on your Dell pc and see if it works better?

On the Dell Optiplex 980 at home, I tried OpenIndiana 2017.10.31, so it's just a few months old, and it wouldn't work. I may beef-up this Zeon machine here at work (has CD drive, not DVD, needs more RAM), and try OpenIndiana on it. It's a nice workstation-grade tower, and pre-UEFI, so I think it will work quite well.

As and aside, I picked up the books "Pro OpenSolaris" and "OpenSolaris Bible" for about $4 each on eBay last night. Can't wait to dig into this OS some more, I'm really liking it so far.

tofino_surfer · 02-07-2018, 11:17 PM

Quote:

Cost of power will never again reduce. I use pi3 for this very reason.

Are you talking about the cost of electricity in Australia ? The OP is from "Cascadia" i.e. the US Pacific Northwest known for cheap electricity from hydroelectric dams. There are many server farms in the area.

MadeInGermany · 02-10-2018, 02:15 PM

It is slow: the effective core speed at 1.2 Ghz clock is 600 Mhz.
The full speed is only used for filling its pipelines, so the total throughput is acceptable. But the T1 CPU has only got one FPU, so floating point throughput is poor.
You could use the box as an NFS server for several clients, with a bunch of disks under ZFS; everything else would be too slow...

birdy-97 · 03-04-2018, 03:52 PM

I think that you will be able to find a good amount of distro's that will run on that current machine. Something I do want to point out is that Openindiana does not support Sparc. I think your best bet will probably be a BSD OS for that machine, unless you want to use an open-source equivalent of Solaris.

jlliagre · 03-05-2018, 03:48 PM

While x86_64 is more tested, here are some illumosb ased distributions that support SPARC so might work on a T2000: