man, you got me hooked on old sun stuff

It’s great to see a ‘smaller’ channel like this growing and gaining more and more subscribers. Here’s to the road to 10k and many many more!

Man you hit the jackpot with both of those being fully populated with not only cpus and ram but also hard drives! What a score! Shoutout to Andy!

When I left my previous work in 2019, there were still a decent number of V440s chugging along in medium to small workloads - including a few production database servers. They were in the process of migrating to an all-Linux solution. Big Sun shop in the day, including an old L700 tape library, and worked on nearly every Sparc from the Sparc 2 to the v880/890, and a few oddballs for short periods (including Sun Blades, and the first T1000s ever made). Main SPARC workhorses over the years were the Sparc 20 (/w Ross CPU), Ultra-2, V240/440, E450, V480 and T2000. The main x64 ones were the 4100, 4600 (ick) and 4170. Note: Be VERY careful with those power supplies, the fans LOVE to seize up; used to keep 5-6 older ones around as spares. Good way to test: Hold it by the handle, let it hang down, and rotate it back and forth with your wrist. If the fan inside stays still, it still has good bearings.

I built on one of these the full delivery for 50+k shares and securities values visualization for 4 major German national newspaper websites. To drawing charts etc. 40+k requests per sec not sweating it. The Application was mostly C/C++ for performance but some Java for the maintenance interface. The hilarious thing was that I had a Sun kernel dev on a call, who diagnosed under voltage on some pci pin with that machines raid controller. Nice job on the video brought back some sweet memories. Sun was a solid shop.

I laughed so hard during the dev stage

Whew, I do remember when these servers were new... racked quite a few of them.

the music at 15:23 and onward was PERFECT for the situation.

Randomly had this series pop up in my recommended and now I’m obsessed with legacy sun stuff! Great series.

I knew a guy who would get these by the pallet doing DC decommissions. Sadly, I never had the thought (or the free space) to grab one. That purple grille design is so iconic and seeing it always takes me back. Great content!

17:07 finally, someone who gave some love to the full name of String class, java.lang.String. Normally, java.lang. is omitted as java.lang is already included by default.

Love those machines, our production machines were E450s - now those were big. E250s were our dev and QA servers. You could always tell when a big query hit the database, the drive array - a E450 chassis stuffed with ? 300MB drives would cause the whole table to start shaking side to side 😀. Good times… I helped write parts of the EJB 1.0/1.1 spec…

At my employer we took our last V440s offline in August of 2022. They were used in a VCS oracle database cluster. Only reason they were shut down was because our new SAN switches no longer supported the HBAs in the Sunfires. They are still sitting in our data center, i think you inspired me to try and get one of them home 😂

Remember seeing this suckers in a purple caged rack. The door had keycard lock on it. And 4 cameras pointing towards this rack from every corner in their room. The sprinkler system was Halon gas. What was they used for? SMS record tracing. And to clarify sms as in a mobile phone text message. The telecom system was heavily Java and sun dependent.

Looking at Java Application Servers again makes me realise we basically reinvented that whole wheel in the cloud a decade later.

Woah, I remember these systems. Haven't seen one in decades.

Grafana itself has "grafana k6" - its a load testing tool, could be used to generate pretty big load, give that a try as well! Love this Sun development and deploying stuff - we have come so far with all that docker and k8s stuff now a day :)

Cool, two Chalupa servers... Back in the day I had one of these as my desktop, via sunray. It was crazy powerful for the time. You should look into the details of the architecture, as the repeater chip these used was very interesting. Jbus was a four point bus, usually allowing 2 jalapenos and two tomatillos. Chalupa used the repeater chip (which I don't recall the name of) which allowed four cpus and four tomatillos, and an enormous amount of memory.

Great video showing you actually _using_ a retro environment!

I’m a simple man. I see clab using Sun anything, I hit the like button. This was a cool look back in time… fun stuff.

I'd never thought I'd watch a video with Enterprise Java today! Keep it up! Love the videos, you're a great host and I can't wait for the next releases!

10/10 - you sounded so confident about building your enterprise app, i literally LOL'd when you started googling it. great work!

I've been developing Java apps of the enterprise-y variety for almost a decade at this point, but not as far back as this. However, things aren't huuuuugely different in a lot of regards. The "build a single file on your desktop / build server and deploy that on your web server" is still a key part of the lifecycle for those apps, though the details tend to differ a lot now. Instead, we are more often deploying a "standalone" .jar file that runs via a Docker container, rather than EAR or WAR files running in a servlet container. The big difference is that Back In The Day everything needed a lot more XML to configure & deploy it than we tend to need now.

The big things in Solaris 10 were SMF, dtrace, and ZFS. I'd love to see deep dives in to each. Cheers and keep up the great content.

Scratching the very small/niche itch I have once again 👌

This is awesome fun stuff you are doing. I loved Sun products and the history of the company and its founders is very interesting. These people were/are brilliant. I was sad to see the company come to an end. Keep it up!

I installed many v440s in the past. Informix, Oracle, Containers clusters... large machines, powerful, heavy, durable

I just wanted to say that I've really been enjoying your vids. All of this old Sun stuff is pretty interesting to me. It's way before my time but there's something about old enterprise stuff that's fascinating. Sun was like the Apple of the IT world. Also, The KZfaq algorithm is scarily good at reccomendations. That's how I found you. It knows me better than I know myself. KZfaq aggressively began recommending me your channel a couple weeks ago. Your vids were always at the top of my home page and at the top of the recommendations on every video, and YT even automatically reenabled autoplay and always had your videos next in the queue. I'm glad I decided to watch instead of clicking ignore. Keep up the good work.

Oh man! I used to be a sysadmin for a university that used 440's and 880's just like these.

Great channel I died laughing when you pulled up the AbstractFactoryProxyBean

Lol that coding montage was solid gold

After watching a load of your videos I feel a lot more prepared if I do travel back in time to 2002 and end up working in the IT department of a bank or something like that.

My first job was writing code for a humungous J2EE app using Java 1.6. It was a huge monolith that ran many of the UK's public sector pension schemes. It was originally a COBOL application that had been transitioned (somewhat) to J2EE that ran on JBoss. It even had a proprietary Java / COBOL bridge since many of the benefit calculations hadn't changed much since the 80's, so were never ported to Java. We had a yearly release cycle.

I always loved suns design work on there servers, they just got better and better over the years. My favorite were the final generations which looked like something apple would design.

man i am loving your channel - we would totally be friends IRL. retro homelab FTW

The more I watch the more I think this would be amazing in places like the NHS. Especially with modern networking you could probably cut deployment costs of workstations. I’ve got friends and family who work in the NHS and they always say the computers are old and broken whereas thin clients would (in theory) allow for so much more power to be just dropped in. Sun was damn cool.

Free Beer and servers? Sweet deal!

Love your videos! Had been dealing with Sun stuff during my university times and loved it. You bring back so many memories!

I share your amazement that Oracle still maintains these downloads. It makes me wonder why they still host them since it’s not a profit center. Was it part of the acquisition agreement? Are developers in 2023 still needing these tools to rescue old code? Or is it more egotistical, like them showing off their industry-consuming corporate entity treasure chest?

I'm absolutely fascinated with these Sun Systems! Keep up the great work!

When those snaps do break, get some plastic glue for miniature models (I personally prefer Citadel brand, but only because I haven't yet been able to try Tamiya Super Thin Model Cement, which I keep getting recommended). It contains acetone, so will melt plastic pieces together in addition to forming a firm physical bond. Source: I play 40k and BattleTech.

Boy! A blast from the past! You did good!

Ear and war files are still used today in a Wildfly applications. They are like a containers, before they were cool.

Those little clip posts were replaceable because they broke. I used to have a little bag of them in the pre-Oracle days.

I just discovered this channel and I have to say I love it!!!! You are amazing, thanks for the videos

Am really enjoying this solaris / thin client series you do. I unfortunatly have to administer TC's from Dell runing ThinOS through citrix. It's cool to see how the similair tech worked almost 2 decades ago. Hope there is more to come.

Loving these videos. The first 10 years of my career was as a solaris admin. Messed with some very nice machines. Favourite was the 6800 with its partitioning. Stacks of netra X1 too (great for spending that last bit of budget before the next financial year). I got out around the same time that Oracle bought Sun. Can't wait to see what nostalgia road you take me down next!

Catching up to the 2000s is fun. 🙌

I have been waiting for your vids like a fiend! Yes!!🎉😊

Nice to see another Sun owner. My v420 finally has a friend 😀

It's kinda funny to see the evolution of the sun stuff. One day I'll document some of the shit I have. Having the LOM on a separate card is something that came across from the 280r, which had a very similar card, but the ones I have also have a modem built into them (well, sorta built in, it's a pcmcia modem on it). But then it had fun stuff like needing a torque wrench (actually provided with the server) to properly torque down the cpu boards. That was similar to the ultra 80 and e420r, as they needed a torque wrench (also provided) for half their memory. One of these days videos like this will stop unlocking old almost forgotten memories 😆

Sweet, pretty beefy stuff. I haven't had the pleasure of lifting a 440 but we do have a few 240s and 120s in use. Those hard plastics might become more flexible and less likely to break if you can cook some water into them. I don't know what plastic type those are particularly but often just letting plastic parts sit in hot water for several hours makes them a lot more flexible. Obviously not too hot to melt and deform them, that depends on the exact type of plastic.

I saw that NABU hiding in the background 😂

15:15 to 17:40 was a work of art

This is super awesome... Getting my Sun Ray running has been a challenge. Especially since I got other stuff. Will post something soon. I can't wait to see/hopefully get a sun hardware soon.

Oh man now I'm really jealous :D Nice catch! I love those Sun Sparc machines I think they're still very much underrated (except among people who had the chance to actually do some work on them). Still lokking to get one for my own, I do have two Sunray 2s lying around, complete with Sun Keyboards and Monitors which I always wanted to set up but never got the chance due to lack of a SunRay server 🙂 I really enjoy watching your videos because it brings back so many memories... keep 'em coming!

This was fun! Really enjoyed it!

Man loving all this sun stuff

that's a flippin' awesome channel!

The Sun Java System Application Server lives on in Glassfish (it's modern incarnation), but I prefer a fork of that, Payara, for Java web development.

I think server hardware back in the day was aesthetically much cooler than stuff currently. See: SGI, DEC AlphaServer, Apple XServe, etc. Wonder why the cool colors and shapes went away...

This is the coolest crap I've seen in a LOOOONG time. Thanks for sharing! Love it!

Heh. I wrote a good chunk of the EJB docs you showed.

I wonder, who used solaris as a OS and for development, seeing how hard it is to make this type of systems work makes me think that these engineers and developers were superhuman....or very patient people

I love the text progress stuff, fits the Unix aesthetic. I’m a sucker for Unix. What could have been,

For 20 years, this Server is crazy.

Sun makes some very good looking servers. I prefer the later silver designs but the purple ones look great as well and they really stand out in a rack. I am also a fan of Cisco server design. I bought a sunfire t2000 to play with a while ago but I never got around to getting it fully set up. But I know what I plan on trying now when I finally have some free time to mess with it.

That was cool. I'm sitting over here trying to figure out what you could populate a large DB table with easily and query the heck out of... Unfortunately I'm drawing a blank. Anyway, looking forward to seeing what you end up doing with these!

Nice to see someone else running Debian on SPARC. I've been experimenting with debian12 and mdadm (no ZFS, sigh) on Sun T1000 and T2000. Not much of a choice there since FreeBSD 12.4 does not support Niagara cpus

First time I replaced one of those CPUs live I was nervous as heck.

If you plug both PSUs in, it'll quiet the fans down some! Used to have one of these guys. :)

Working in IT for nearly 30 years, I have absolutely hated every single Java application I have had to deal with, from FC switch management to storage management, they have always presented problems every time the Java environment is updated. I have VMs with old installs of Windows XP and Java 5 and 7 so I can run those old Java apps that just drive me crazy.

Amazing viseo

I just finished packaging the latest Opus codec on Solaris 10 not 15 minutes ago. I need it for OpenAl, which I need for the fs-uae Amiga emulator. I have tons of modern software packaged and running on Solaris 10. Runs like a champ and is really fast.

Wow can't imagine what your electric bill look like with all that biffy things at your place...😮

I would say, you don’t know what a long post could be. I use to admin small sun4m systems to the e10k and netra ft 1800. When the diag-switch? Was set to true we would boot, take a long lunch with beer. By the time we roll back in to the office we would be at the ok prompt. Standard operating procedure was to make sure it was set to false before we did an init 6 for production systems.

Its my favorite sparc rack server, also my fist one

Good gear, but not very practical today. I don't know if there is a server museum somewhere, but this thing in such a good condition might be a great display piece. I remember Solaris, it was quite a good OS, by the way.

One day, you may obtain a Sun thumper X4500 or double it with an X4540 model (code-named Thor). Powered by ZFS and SSD caching. Could do object-store with big compute on the data within.

I wish I was around when stuff like this was put into production. Makes me feel like I missed on the era before the cloud-BS-license-hellscape we are in today.

I'm very curious if you put a PCI graphics card adapter in it if it would post on a screen, rather than the serial connection.

Man Sun was such a cool & interesting company, almost makes me want to get into coding. almost.

Project darkstar might be a fun thing to make it sweat. Certainly more interesting than enterprise net beans, anyway.

To note, no one payed list price on these things. "List" price was (and still is) just a scheme to make managers feel good about themselves when they "put the screws to the dealer" to get a better price. But don't get me wrong, Sun's enterprise servers still weren't cheap. Sadly, the "V" line of the SunFire range were Sun's continued attempt to stanch the bleeding of cheap x86 servers. They led to cost cutting and it showed in the build quality of those things. I can't tell you how many daughter boards failed on me over the years I managed Sun gear (or how easily that plastic fascia broke off. And don't get me started on the COMICAL lock they put on those things.

What would you run on a netra t5220 ... totally asking for a friend... It's got a ton of threads (but they're slow af) And it's got tons of high-speed networking (but it's pciX) I have been meaning to learn kubernetes....

Ok at 23:30 you do something fun with 4 terminals at once, is that using tmux? I’ve used pdsh to run jobs in parallel across multiple servers but not like you did there.

Love your vids, but please change camera angle from backside of your arm and hand covering most things you do. ❤

Mosix cluster is nice

right, You'll need a FC StorEdge 3500 and Oracle 10g ... switches and everything twin paired for high availability ... ;-)

Beans! Beans beans beans, beans beans, beans. Beans?

"... I'm sure there is someone out there that hasn't seen this in a very long time." *Raises paw* Your channel is so nostalgic for me. Thanks for keeping such memories alive.

J2EE didn't really have capabilities, despite what the documentation says. They weren't far off - you can get pretty close, but reflection like Class.forName is a pretty clear violation of capability patterns. There was a project called Joe-E at some point that attempted to slightly modify Java into a capability system and provide a fairly sensible taming of the EE libraries.

You should probably pop one of those retaining posts out and measure it up fully just in case you ever need to get one 3D printed, can't imagine you can still buy them as spares.

You should get a v880 next ;-)

Sun Micro systems spud's are hard to come by now adays.

i see that NABU in the back, when are we gonna see a vid on that obscurity?

I love sun hardware , I wish some other company swallowed them up , maybe a company that has any active interest in hardware .

Those battery holders might actually have originally been for the next size thinner, a 1616.

Wish I had them donated ha would love too own a beast of a server like that for development ha

You know, you could always keep a couple seconds of the actual noise level of the server, so we can hear the original noise