This Old SPARC
The story of a geek and his Sun SPARCstations (and UltraSPARCs), and the trials, tribulations,
and small victories that go with the care and feeding of such a menagerie.
Wednesday, August 29, 2001
Installed Ruby on all the boys. I figured it was about time I saw what all the fuss is about. One thing I like so far: the compilation process was butt-simple (like most autoconf-driven compilations), and it compiles down to one executable, at about 1.5 meg. I just copied this file around, and had Ruby installed on all three boxes in no time.
posted by Mike Thomas 8/29/2001 09:27:03 PM
Wednesday, August 22, 2001
Hmmm. Zap (the Ultra 10 - my main workstation) was locked up like a Wintel box (meaning hard) this morning. I thought at first that XWindow is what had locked up, so I tried telnet'ing into zap, but there was no response whatsoever. I crossed my fingers and hard booted. Coming back up, zap reported some filesystem errors that I had to fix with fsck. I can't recall running weird, or installing anything new recently. Hopefully this was just an isolated incident. However, the fact that it even happened at all is weird/scary.
posted by Mike Thomas 8/22/2001 07:48:36 AM
Thursday, August 16, 2001
Ordered Debian 2.2 / SPARC today off of eBay for $13 including shipping. Yes, I know, I could have downloaded it, etc., etc. But I don't have a CD burner, or a super-fast connection (yet - DSL should be here in about a month). So $13 seems pretty damn reasonable. I'll be installing this on the Ultra 10, just for fun. This should be relatively painless, since I don't actually run very much locally on the U10. I run Netscape and EveryBuddy on the Ultra 1 and just send the displays to the U10. I will have to reinstall Together/J, etc., but that's OK.
posted by Mike Thomas 8/16/2001 10:34:07 AM
Sunday, August 05, 2001
Woohoo! I finally hit 100 workunits on SETI@Home. Not bad for a puny little dual-processor SS10 and an Ultra 1 200E.
posted by Mike Thomas 8/5/2001 10:24:22 PM
Monday, July 09, 2001
I've finally gotten around to working out a static IP arrangement with Qwest so that I can host samoht.com out of my house. It required changing the ISP package I currently purchase from them to another package. It was a very time-consuming process, with lots of passing the buck, but hopefully within a few days I'll be rocking. The plan is to use sparky as my web server. Since sparky is a little low on disk space, I'll probably just run Tomcat for now, since it's a JSP engine that can also act as an HTTP server, thus killing two birds with one stone. Sparky may also host the mySQL database as well, but I may decide to let buzz do that instead.
I've already got a cheesy little JSP set up to prove that I can get at DB content via the mySQL JDBC driver and render it into HTML. It works great. My plan is to make several sections of the site more dynamic, and add some sections that I've always wanted (like a fitness log). I'm going to start with a photo album application, since my current photo albums, and my artwork pages, are coded entirely in JavaScript, and that bugs me.
posted by Mike Thomas 7/9/2001 08:05:56 AM
Thursday, May 03, 2001
Well, I guess I should post here just to say "no news is good news". All my "children" are up and running happily. There's a little less adventure now that I've learned quite a bit about Solaris and my SPARC/Ultra boxen. That doesn't mean that challenges don't still exist.
I did wrestle a bit with the UPS I bought some time ago. Turns out that while it's supposed to tell me when it's overloaded, it doesn't. Well, it does tell me, but it does it by shutting down and therefore causing all the boys to reboot about once a week, with the smallest power hiccup (my other machines, not on UPS, would soldier right thru these hiccups) . Ironic that using a UPS has caused more reboots than not having one, eh? So, I finally broke down and moved sparky and buzz off of the UPS. Now it's just zap on there, humming away.
I continue to run SETI@Home on both buzz and sparky. I'm getting up there in rankings. Seems that it's pretty easy to hit the 75th percentile, but beyond that it's hard to make progress in the rankings. I suppose it's because of a hard-core group of folks that have been running SETI@Home for years on bunches of machines, while most people have run it once or twice, then lost interest. With the processor speeds of sparky and buzz, it will take me years to get near the top.
posted by Mike Thomas 5/3/2001 06:48:42 AM
Thursday, March 22, 2001
Added link to my SETI@Home Stats.
posted by Mike Thomas 3/22/2001 08:36:13 AM
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