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Can my SPARC server host a website?

rup12.net

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Re: Can my SPARC server host a website?

#51

Post by lproven »

dmd wrote: post #17

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.

> It baffles me that anyone would consider this a question at all.

Thank you for saying this. I read this article a few days ago and felt the same: it's a 64-bit gigahertz-class RISC purporse designed internet server with a gig of RAM, running a current OS released less than 4 months ago.

OF COURSE it can host a website. A hundred active ones at once, I should think.

Re: Can my SPARC server host a website?

#54

Post by rurban »

tokyobreakfast wrote: post #27

Interesting it is running OpenBSD 7.8. 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.

Calling strict alignment requirements "beloved" is a wide stretch. You had to split loops into Sparc and Ubsan, vs normal variants.

Re: Can my SPARC server host a website?

#57

Post by lacoolj »

skissane wrote: post #32
lacoolj wrote: post #30

> Memory: 56MiB / 1024MiB 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

> This is the beefiest SPARC I have ever seen My sarcasm detector came defective from the factory, and I've always struggled with getting it to work effectively. So, if you aren't being sarcastic: 20 years ago, place I worked had a Sun Fire 15K. They supported max 576GB of RAM. Don't remember how much ours had, it probably wasn't a maxxed out config, but I'm sure it was a lot more than 1GB. The machine cost over $1 m…

I only ever played with a sparcstation 5, and mine had a whopping 128MB and felt like room to spare.

Re: Can my SPARC server host a website?

#58

Post by ruptwelve »

Author here: Thank you for posting this link! And I see the sentiment: "Of course it can, it was built for that"! And I fully agree! My clickbaity title was meant to be in the spirit of 2026. Exposing an older server (although not an old OS) to the internet and all it's nasties was not something I would lightly do. But this old Netra does a good job! I guess the Cloudflare tunnel is a bit of cheating here, but I did not feel comfortable exposing something running at home. So CF came in clutch.

As for the hardware, yeah 1GB of RAM on a 2001 server, kits it out nicely! But even with that, I tried to limit what is running there so the server would actually work smoothly. (I even compiled a few Rust binaries, and yeah that took ages).

My old hardware collection has plenty of other candidates for hosting a website. So expect more!

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