I've been offered a Sparc 5 for a good price, I've also found a place knocking out Sparc 20's as well. My two questions are:

Question 1: How do they compare? The 5 has a 70Mhz processor, not sure about the 20, but they both have 64MB and decent sized HD's.

Question 2: Should I stick with Solaris or put Linux on it?

The machine will be used for routing, NAT and firewalling. I may very well get both, but I just thought I'd ask. My experience outside the wintel arena has simply been linux on x86 so I'm not that familiar with the Sun gear.

They do look damn cool though!

It depends on the CPU. Some Sparc 5's were faster than than the 20's. And if the 20 is a Hyper-sparc - Run!

As far as the OS: If you're planning on running Solaris with CDE I wouldn't go past 2.5. The performance hit just isn't worth trying to run anything better (it will run mind you but s-l-o-w.) I have an Ultra 1 running Linux and I love it.

SS5 70 is the slowest SS5 you can get. If it's not cheap cheap cheap, don't bother. Find out what the 2 has for CPUs. Realize the 2 can have up to 4 (but typically not more than 2) CPUs.

SparcLinux development stagnated around when RedHat dropped sparc, but may have picked up again. The SS5 audio is supported; The SS20 audio support wasn't finished unless someone got involved after I stopped being involved.Why does this matter? Not really, unless you want to play with network sniffers that do audio (somewhat amusing).

I would stay away from Sparcs for routing, though, because 100mb capable SBus cards just aren't cheap enough, and there's only one interface onboard (and it's probably 10mb on both of these)

The Sparc 5s were still being made after they dropped the Sparc 20s (apparently due to a government contract), and, as such, their processors were faster at the top end. However, you can put up to, I believe, four processors in a Sparc20, if you can find them, so it can be quite a bit faster.

But the thing is, what kind of price are you getting on a Sparc 5 that you think is so remarkable? Any UltraSparc machine is going to be faster by a long shot (even the pokey Ultra 5s and 10s), and they can be had for a few hundred dollars. A good price on a Sparc 5, IMO, would be around $30.

I wouldn't bother running Solaris on anything other than an UltraSparc, except, maybe a multi-processor 20. But I don't think I'd go with Linux, either. Check out OpenBSD or NetBSD.

A good price on a Sparc 5, IMO, would be around $30


Yep, it seems as though the accessories are more sought after than the boxes themselves - the auctions with "lots of accessories" are the only ones that appear to attract significant bids.

http://search-completed.ebay.com/search/search.dll?GetResult&query="sparc+station+5"&from=R10&ht=1&currdisp=2&itemtimedisp=1&combine=y&st=2&SortProperty=MetaEndSort

the 5 was offered for £60, this included 64Meg of memory and a 10Gig HD. The 20 had 128Meg but a smaller HD. The disc space would be nice as it will probably do a bit of light web serving as well. I'm waiting for more specs on the 20 before I make a decision.

They come up on ebay all the time, and uk.comp.sys.sun and uk.adverts.computer occasionally.

I've been meaning to get one myself sometime - purely to have a computer that cost megabucks when it was new - I've got an sgi Indy in the corner at home but unfortunately it switched on a couple of times and then I think the lithium battery in the RTC zonked out. At £20+ for a new one I'm waiting for a motherboard to appear on ebay.

Gareth

Is a hyper sparc good? Seen one on ebay.....

HyperSparcs are the processors that were in Sparc 20s. (Sort of. There were also, originally, SuperSparcs, but they were more complex, and, as it turned out, ultimately slower. I don't really quite understand the ``run'' comment, either.) If you see it specified that way on eBay, it's likely to just be a processor with no computer around it.

I don't know how much money you've got to spend, but the best buy in the Sparc arena right now is probably the Ultra2. You can get one for a few hundred dollars, it's not that many revisions back, and can be upgraded quite a ways.

There's a pretty good overview of Sparc processors. Note that that survey is fairly old, but takes you up to the first generation of UltraSparcs. Sun was remarkably slow in getting to the next real generation (and that's not a whole lot more than just a marked speed improvement), and they just started coming out a year ago or so.

Didn't one of the clone vendors do a whole machine called a hypersparc?

I don't remember and I'm too lazy to look.

That's possible, but I don't remember a lot about the non-Sun Sparc machines. I've only ever worked on one of them.

I was thinking of Tatung or Axil, but it appears I imagined it.

I had a Tatung COMPstation at one point that I got used, free. I wonder if I still have it.

As a postscript, I ended up getting a 110Mhz Sparc 5 with two 5G drives and CD. I also got a rather natty 17" Sun monitor with Trinitron tube thrown in. I put Suse 7.3 on it last night and wasn't particularly impressed so I've taken Mr. Faulks advice and will be giving netBSD a try.

Ooh, happy days, now if I can find an onyx going cheap....

If you weren't impressed by Linux on it (I'm assuming you're talking about speed), then I doubt you'll be impressed by BSD, either. But I could be wrong.

I had no problems with the speed on a 4/110 (same cpu) but in fact the application experience was lacking for 2 reasons:
1) not x86 so none of software that just uses windows dlls worked. (less then than now)
2) sparc is byteswapped, so until people noticed and fixed things a lot didn't work. i'd expect less of that now.

There's no harm in trying, looks like my friday night is spoken for now!

I'd argue that x86 is ``byteswapped'', but to each his own.

Well, I'm a sparc guy, so to me the x86 is byte swapped, but I recognize the world I live in.

I still have a SunOS 4 system which is basically the same data as what started on my Sun 3/160 and has been moved from disk to disk and cpu to cpu through a 3/80, SS1, SS1+, SS2 and is now on a SparcClassic. I never upgraded further.

I'd argue that x86 is ``byteswapped'', but to each his own.

This is the off-topic area, but it's still the Empeg BBS. ARM is definitive. IA32 is fortuitously ARM-compatible. Sparc is byte-swapped.

Peter

PS. Yes, people can run the ARM the other way round. But those people are weird.

Maybe. Or maybe those people are right. You could have chosen to run the ARM with the one true byte order and didn't

Ditto for modern SPARCs these days, too.

Intel remains the one true inflexible CPU architecture.

-ml

Well, x86. IA-64 is suppoed to be bi-endian. Not to mention that Intel owns ARM now.

I'm glad to see that the endians aren't being discriminated against by Intel, regardless of their orientation.

-Zeke

Well, actually, Intel discriminates against big endians.

--

One little two little three little endian...

Well, actually, Intel discriminates against big endians.

[Emily Litella]

But Intel says that they are proud of their H1B visa program!!.....Never Mind!

[/Emily Litella]

ROFLMAO!



-Zeke

In reply to:

---

Not to mention that Intel owns ARM now.

---

When did that happen?
They own the DEC Strongarm implementation of the ARM architecture (now XScale), but ARM are still around (and doing rather nicely too).

Back on topic, I've got my Sparc 5 (110Mhz, 1 gig disc) up and running with Debian at the moment. It works quite well (compared to my other Linux box which is a P133). However I'd like to stuff some more discs in. Can I use any off the shelf 80 pin SCA SCSI drive? Scan have a 9gig for 45 quid that I've been tempted to get. Also are the drive caddies easy to get?

Can I use any off the shelf 80 pin SCA SCSI drive?

Yes, with the caveat that you need to make sure they don't produce too much heat. I forget what the actual specs are, but you should be able to find it somewhere on the web.

Also are the drive caddies easy to get?

Not really. You can find them, but you'll have to look hard. Most of Sun's brackets are known as Spud Brackets. The one in the SS5 is not a spud bracket. It is specific to the 4s, 5s, 10s, and 20s. I don't know that it has a name, but the part number is 540-2570. Sun is unlikely to sell it directly (without a drive attached to it), even if you can otherwise buy from them. They'd rather you buy the drive from them and pay their huge markup.

I take it back. It looks like Silicon Gear makes them, so they shouldn't be too hard to find.

These are 7200rpm, so shouldn't be too bad heat wise, however I'll see if I can find the actual specs.

Thanks for the info. =)

One last question, what linux distros are you guys using on your sparcs? I'm currently playing with suse 7.3 but I'm not particularly impressed with yast1.

I was running suse, but I've switched to Debian now.
It was fairly easy to install from the serial console too (I don't have a Sun monitor, so the machines are running headless).

Any reason why you switched to debian?

I get the feeling that the sparc version of suse is rather out of date. I have been running Mandrake on x86, but again, the sparc version of that is a few versions out.

I felt the Debian version was the most current (of the well known distributions), and I keep hearing how good apt-get is.

As I have two sparc5s, I might stick BSD on one.

My UltraSparc 1 is running Solaris. My SpracStation 1+, when I still had it up, was running initially RedHat v.something, but I quickly discovered that it sucked, and switched it to, I believe, OpenBSD.

So none of them.

Linux sucked badly on everything sun4c. I tried and never did find the problem, I remember when it happened and was trying to figure out what change broke it.

The SPARCstation 4 next to my desk is running Debian. Well, I say "running". It's not been turned on for quite a while.

I guess it's been a while since I did any sparc development. I gave up and just put the Sparcbook I was using to develop drivers for that on ebay. It's still running Linux. I suspect the OpenBSD people got further there. I got busy and never had time again.