T-series machines, was Re: OpenSXCE, was Re: Vintage era

On 02/10/2013 12:26 PM, Toby Thain wrote: SPARC is awesome, there are some very good ideas in it. Between zones and LDOMs, you have almost everything you could want in terms of virtualization outside of intel. There were some problems with LDOMs early on such as needing to reboot in order to reconfigure certain things, but the later versions have gotten those fixed. Not sure what Oracle did with it, I haven't kept up. A few years before Sun imploded, a pair of T5140s with tons of RAM and some iSCSI or FCAL storage would be enough to run a small company and would consume less than half a rack. Java ran on those like greased lightning. Oh well... I guess in the end, it all depends on what Oracle wants to do with it, and had it left OpenSolaris open, it might have had a chance. The other other manfacturers, and I think Fuji made SPARCs that were used in supercomputers. Not sure generic SPARC boards are available out there at reasonable prices. It truly is a workhorse and always was. Register windows for the win. Oracle seems to be aiming at Fortune 100 only, but sadly for them Fortune 100 is as cutthroat as possible price wise, and except for existing systems, they are more likely to remove SPARC and switch to linux on x86_64... Sadly, like the Alpha, and MIPS, it's likely to fall to the side. I guess there's still POWER and ARM for now, and ARM's taking off for consumer toys. I do like my Android tablets and phone, and they're quite nice devices, but they're not powerful. In terms of OS, we still have openindiana and a whole family of operating systems, and ports of ZFS based off it. My home server runs oi151a7 and I'm very happy with it. But, it's on intel, and such as it is, it's still a good server for home use. I do have a T1000 that I've been meaning to fix - had some bad RAM which I recently replaced. I'm now regretting purchasing that RAM, now that I see prices for other T-series boxes drop. :) Infact, it's on my kitchen table, I literally just blew the dust out of its insides (was complaining about voltage drops and the old memory failures, and blowing out the dust from underneath the motherboard allowed me to power it on finally.) Sorry, this is offtopic, but how does one run OpenSXCE on a T1000? Is there some sort of jumstart available for it? I suppose I can run proper Solaris 11.1 on it, or good old Solaris 10. Many months ago I tried to get Solaris 10 installed on it but couldn't do it anyway except via jumpstart. Attaching a SATA DVD drive did not allow booting, not even after adding the right device aliases in the openboot-prom.