Ronald Prettyman

So I decide I wanted to get a better look at the CPU’s in the Blade1000, well their huge, they weigh at least 8lbs a piece (mostly heatsink).So as you see here, its huge, and has alot going on. So I started to peck around a found a odd screws around the cpu. Their are also those great slide rail harddisk. With easy release clips. Very nice. Theirs an add on gigbit nic to replace the onboard 10/100 (which again impressive for 2001). 64-bit PCI I believe. Then their the memory, 4 512 sims (I think this system can take 4 gigs). Then their are those CPU’s. I had to get a closer look. I noticed that screw and I started looking around and if you notice between the harddrives theirs a green thing. IN that greenthing is a wrench. The wrench is used to remove the cpu. So I removed it. Fairly easy and got some great shot. The thing is alot heavier then it looks. At least 8 lbs.

So the juicy Part. I can’t figure out if i put it back in right. Then I find a little booklet that has picture on disassembly (great now i find it) and reassembly. So I manage to get it hooked up and want to run a test post just to check. I hook it up. NOTHING. I try removing it reinserting it. Changing the plug. Then I think. Wait this think is so well built, the case just pops off with the right amount of pressure in the right spots (not during shipping ;}) so I put the case on. Wala it works. It immediately powers on. Thank god. and just for good measure, heres a shot of the terminal, or xterminal emulator or what ever.

Some more pictures of the Sun Blade 1000 Sun Ultra 2 Creator or Sun Ultra Creator 2 and Sun SparcStation 5 and External SCSI drive

SUN BLADE 1000 Pictures, Sun Blade 1000 Internal Pictures, Sun Blade 1000 900 Mhz, Sun Blade 1000 Dual 900 Mhz. Sun Blade 1000 Disassemble

So I decide I wanted to get a better look at the CPU’s in the Blade1000, well their huge, they weigh at least 8lbs a piece (mostly heatsink).So as you see here, its huge, and has alot going on. So I started to peck around a found a odd screws around the cpu.

Well I’ve sort of left Debian behind (on my workstation I’ve still got it running on a couple servers) but I’ve switched to OpenSuSe or however their spelling it now. But its very solid, I’ve never actually run it on decent hardware and its very impressive. Looks great and feels solid. Now I’ve had to disable some of their ideas of perfection, such as openvirtualbox and openjdk. Let me just say if it FREE while on earth would I want the opensource *cough*broken*cough* version. I shouldn’t need a seperate kernel to run VirtualBox. Xen yes, but VBox. NO its not that complicated. Compile the module, debmod modprobe, wala done, no need to edit, the fucking menu config, Then I’ll have to recompile all my damn modules(that are never as good when I don’t compile myself.) But that aside OpenSuSe is great, at least 11.1 is. Best of all. YOU LISTENED, and didn’t compile the kernel with PCI-E Root Error Dump. Thank god. I am so tired of recompiling kernels to get my cheapo mobo’s to work. Now to just figure out how to get xen to stop screaming about my mobo’s. Or get Solaris to support them and solve it all in one swing. But thats for another day. But any way. Running OpenSuse and Its great feels real solid and so far no complants. I see alot of review talking about default software and really thats trivial any more. Its about how solid it feel and then what software. Redhat Fedora feels great. But its lack of properiety software sucks. Pay the damn royalties. I’m sticking with Suse until they decide to drop them. Which I doubt seeing how their in League with Microsoft and several other giants. Don’t go all cheap on me now and drop your propriety support. I’m all for opensource. But their comes a time when reality sinks in and its like. I like mp3 at least m3u. And I like Flash. I like dvd’s. I want to be able to double my workstation as a server. I like unix based. That rules out, Fedora, Redhat, FreeBSD, well all the BSD’s. And really its ruled out Debian, their flash support sucks, and getting it to work sucks even more. Ubuntu’s gone cause its not a great server/workstation. Its an ok headless, and an ok desktop but not a workstation. And lets just face it, windows is expensive, and dos sucks. If windows had bash and slocate, I might consider it. But it doesn’t (now just to get slocate to work in solaris, and it might be worth the mobo upgrade).

Up and running Solaris 10 on the Blade 1000. Which is surprisingly fast, considering its only running at 900mhz, it does just about everything I want with out blinking an eye. So I know slowlaris is a term that I’ve heard, but I don’t see it, it runs fast for me. Considering it was built in 2001. Dual UltraSparc III 900mhz and 2 Gigs on ECC ram this thing is pretty sweet for my use. I haven’t really run any benchmarks but I’m sure I’d see the speed drop their. But running Solaris 10 it seems to do great.

update: Did a raw dump of my MySQL database on an old debian server with around 30,000 entries and restored it to the new blade machine, and it really improved performance, and worked great. I duplicated the file structor and i’m up and running on the new database. With the old one as an easy backup.
Also setup a slave dns server and managed to resolve all my entries over to the sparc machine and set it up as the main dhcp server. And set it as the primary dns server and now my resolves are much faster, it also seems to cache quicker. So my internet speed actually went up a little. It always pays to have an actual dns server. If for nothing else then just caching. And the blade it practically silent compared to old server. But still have it as a backup if I need to do some maintenance.

So yeah enough with that, here are the beautiful picture of my new baby boy.
The box it came was massive, the UPS guy was laughing the whole way down the drive way. And this thing is heavy weighing in a 70lbs. Its beautiful, this thing has better construction then my last car. Two hot swap fiber cable drives. Dual 900 Mhz UltraSparc III’s this things is awesome. The video card is freak’n huge. Like 18″. Packing 2gigs of memory (not even maxed out) this this is awesome, considering I found an amazing deal on ebay. I don’t even want to think what I could of paid. Much less what people paid when this things first came out. But its a beauty. I also got a Sun Type 7 keyboard kit to go with it, with 3lbs power cables, this thing is server grade. You can really tell from the picture but this shit is solid, the cables really have a heavy duty feel to them and the keyboard has some rear usb ports built in.

Did I mention that the sun logo has three led’s to light it up. I really can’t begin to explain how massive this thing is.

And last but not least, a nice little screen shot, running Solaris 10 and migrating my file server over from Debian.

So yeah I’m listening to the song, Head on to Heartache ~ DevilDriver, bad ass song. Right so my fucking audio server decides to shit a break, its been acting up any way. So I try to restart it and say fuck you ron, I don’t know what your talking about. So fuck it, I find the audio module and supersede the alsa-bitch server. modprobe straight to fucking pulseaudio. and wow, a little skipping (need to tweak the internal wattage) but shit much more clarity.

Well it appears that the reason I haven’t recieved my work computer is cause I got stupid and asked for a mac, it seems that apple has a shipping error.
But any way, while I wait to learn about Mac OS/x, I started to tackle another Unix system, Solaris. So after tons of research I started to install solaris on a ultra 2. But then I killed the cdrom in the process. So I build a boot server on my debian machine. Which was no easy task, but figured it out, got it to boot and started to install solaris. Well the disc was acting strange. It wasn’t registering right, I had to install a core solaris system and couldn’t get it to post, just kept going on about Sendmail this that and the other.

So I’ve got a vm at work running solaris but I won’t start playing with that until tonight. I also picked up another newer sparcs box on ebay, a Sun Blade 1000 with dual sparc III 900′s which should be faster then the ultra 2 with dual 300′s.

Don’t get me wrong, the Ultra 2 is a sweet little machine, and for its age, its a fast piece of equipment, it keeps up with my Celeron 1.8 laptop pretty well, though it can’t touch my AMD X2 4000 desktop, and my too be coming soon 2.8 Intel Core 2 Duo Mac book will probably leave it in the dust as well. But it has harddrive slides and cpu slides and 16 dimm slots and supports up to 2gigs of ram. Which is impressive for a machine built in the 90′s. Well beyond impressive.

So I gave up on Solaris 10 and Solaris 8 on the Ultra 2. Just not fast enough for me to tolerate it just yet, and it just keeps giving me trouble and I don’t know enough about Solaris yet to deal with it. But the Blade 1000 already has Solaris 10 loaded on it and a DVD drive to easily reinstall it. And with the brand new sun type 7 kit I’ve got coming from sun directly, it should make for a very sexy setup.

Well I’m gonna go ahead and upload some picture here. So check em out, and will someone leave a fucking comment or something already.

A brief break down on how to get the sparcs system to boot.

Well if you can get a linux kernel to tftp boot.

Mount the cd, share it with nfs, add a bootparm for root=/cdromlocation/Solaris_10/Tools/Boot install=/cdromlocation/

Copy the /cdromlocation/Solaris_10/Tools/Boot/platform/sun4u/inetboot /locationofyourtftpfiles/C08whateveryourbootfilesrequestis
replace sun4u with the achitecture that applies to you
NOTE: This is only for SPARC based Solaris 10 installs from a Linux Server

Other then that its pretty standard.