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I’m starting to get tired of these old hardware or minimally powered hardware hosting website posts. It’s not that novel anymore.
27 years ago my job was hosting hundreds of websites (CBS News, among them) on Sun hardware just like that. It baffles me that anyone would consider this a question at all.
Uhh, Yes? It is literally probably what this machine was doing in 2001. (Source: guy who hosted websites on sparc's in 1995)
I don't think it's necessarily a dumb question; yes SPARC machines were used all over the web in the 90's and 2000's, but the web has changed a lot in the last twenty years. If nothing else, I could see not being able to find a recent-enough TLS package being an issue. I realize that reading through the article that they did get OpenBSD working on there and yeah if you can get a modern OS on there it will probably wo…
It's not a dumb question, but OP didn't answer it. Cloudflare is fronting the website. So we don't know if the server is handling the entire traffic, nor if it's using TLS between it and Cloudflare.
The whole dot.com boom when every company on earth scrambled to host their website... pretty much all of them on Sun hardware. Thus the insane run up of SUNW share price prior to the bust.
27 years ago my job was hosting hundreds of websites (CBS News, among them) on Sun hardware just like that. It baffles me that anyone would consider this a question at all.
Were those websites supporting SSL connections, much less TLS 1.2? That would be my question on hardware that old. (In this case, it looks like they offload TLS to Cloudflare, so the machine itself isn't doing any encryption/decryption.)
These old SPARCs are beloved by their developers for their ability to uncover obscure low-level bugs due to the platform's strictness.
Everyone else has adequately pointed out SPARC boxes basically ran the Internet back in the day. It wasn't uncommon to have a single box hosting an entire university department: email, web serving, application server, login shell, etc.
I’m starting to get tired of these old hardware or minimally powered hardware hosting website posts. It’s not that novel anymore.
27 years ago my job was hosting hundreds of websites (CBS News, among them) on Sun hardware just like that. It baffles me that anyone would consider this a question at all.
Agreed. The Netscape IPO was over 30 years ago. What do people think the web was running on back then? And why do you think that machine is called a Netra?
Netras were designed for telco use so not for any obvious reason as you suggest. It was available with -48V power supplies.
This is the beefiest SPARC I have ever seen. Very cool this is running. Getting this set up is no easy feat if you haven't tried before. Props to OP