Can my SPARC server host a website?
rup12.net
Can my SPARC server host a website?
1–10 of 58 posts
Re: Can my SPARC server host a website?
#2Uhh, Yes? It is literally probably what this machine was doing in 2001.
(Source: guy who hosted websites on sparc's in 1995)
Re: Can my SPARC server host a website?
#3Uhh, Yes? It is literally probably what this machine was doing in 2001. (Source: guy who hosted websites on sparc's in 1995)
I remember SPARC being the mainstay of webhosting. It seems weird for this question to be posed.
UltraSparc smoked Intel at web server response times because it could handle so many more threads for Apache.
Re: Can my SPARC server host a website?
#4Uhh, Yes? It is literally probably what this machine was doing in 2001. (Source: guy who hosted websites on sparc's in 1995)
I remember SPARC being the mainstay of webhosting. It seems weird for this question to be posed. UltraSparc smoked Intel at web server response times because it could handle so many more threads for Apache.
They even made CPU with a uarch specifically for webservers in the mid 2000s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1 The VHDL was later published under the GPL.
Re: Can my SPARC server host a website?
#5Somewhat sad OP is using cloud flare. If it was 2001 you'd just have it with some basic firewall appliance in-front of it.
Re: Can my SPARC server host a website?
#6Of course, and it works well too. When I moved houses from solar wind to solar + mains I switched my e450 off, this is only 4 years ago; it works fine. I love that machine ; it looks the part and it's indestructible. My company in the early 2000s was running on sparcstation 5s, a lot of them (they were giving them away by that time); I have them all in my garage and they all work still.
Re: Can my SPARC server host a website?
#7Uhh, 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 work fine, but I don't think the core question of "Can my SPARC server host a website?" is dumb.
Re: Can my SPARC server host a website?
#8I’m starting to get tired of these old hardware or minimally powered hardware hosting website posts. It’s not that novel anymore.
Re: Can my SPARC server host a website?
#9I’m starting to get tired of these old hardware or minimally powered hardware hosting website posts. It’s not that novel anymore.
You're welcome to not read, but as someone who grew up in a certain era, it's pretty cool to see the old things. The webpage he's serving reminds me of all sorts of early internet things, where the knowledge was real and we were just pushing it onto this new thing. The actual site: https://sparc.rup12.net/ has a vibe similar to https://johnlind.tripod.com/, which is incredible. The knowledge is timeless.
> Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or higher
I feel young again...
Re: Can my SPARC server host a website?
#10I’m starting to get tired of these old hardware or minimally powered hardware hosting website posts. It’s not that novel anymore.
It’s more subtle to me: I’ll never say no to retrocomputing (especially what you need to open yourself to the public internet without getting pwned), but “use a low end VPN and save $$$$!” is a bit old now.