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Can my SPARC server host a website?
  • dmd
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  • 5 hours ago
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27 years ago my job was hosting hundreds of websites (CBS News, among them) on Sun hardware just like that. It baffles me that anyone would consider this a question at all.
Agreed. The Netscape IPO was over 30 years ago. What do people think the web was running on back then?

And why do you think that machine is called a Netra?

> And why do you think that machine is called a Netra?

Netras were designed for telco use so not for any obvious reason as you suggest. It was available with -48V power supplies.

  • Uvix
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  • 4 hours ago
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Were those websites supporting SSL connections, much less TLS 1.2? That would be my question on hardware that old. (In this case, it looks like they offload TLS to Cloudflare, so the machine itself isn't doing any encryption/decryption.)
He offloads TLS to the Proxmox server within their home network. TLS is used between that server and Cloudflare to keep everything safe during transport.
Recent OpenBSD should be able to do modern TLS, and probably ACME, which would have been more interesting.
  • jjav
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  • 4 hours ago
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As other say, what a strange question.

The whole dot.com boom when every company on earth scrambled to host their website... pretty much all of them on Sun hardware. Thus the insane run up of SUNW share price prior to the bust.

Interesting it is running OpenBSD 7.8.

These old SPARCs are beloved by their developers for their ability to uncover obscure low-level bugs due to the platform's strictness.

Everyone else has adequately pointed out SPARC boxes basically ran the Internet back in the day. It wasn't uncommon to have a single box hosting an entire university department: email, web serving, application server, login shell, etc.

Of course, and it works well too. When I moved houses from solar wind to solar + mains I switched my e450 off, this is only 4 years ago; it works fine. I love that machine ; it looks the part and it's indestructible. My company in the early 2000s was running on sparcstation 5s, a lot of them (they were giving them away by that time); I have them all in my garage and they all work still.
  • arjie
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  • 1 hour ago
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Cloudflare Tunnels are awesome, dude. My blog is hosted on one and it's great how much you can configure on top of Cloudflare. I'm like the biggest enthusiast based on their feature set and how much they make free. Easy to convert me when I get to try even putting personal websites on their authentication flow.
Slightly off topic, but: is it just me or does it become uninteresting to read things like this when the whole process is basically “so then I asked Claude this, and then I asked it this, and then this…”

I guess it takes away the intrigue of the project because anyone could do this (ask ai), and the only thing human left about it is the creativity of the idea itself. There’s not much merit to the effort.

Edit: nothing against the author or anything, it’s fun to do projects like this.

But I always kinda likened AI output to your kids’ artwork - to you it’s the best. To someone else, it doesn’t have as much impact.

its incredibly uninteresting and marks the perfect point to close the tab and go back to something enriching
That loaded faster than most pages I visit.

Also, excellent use of the marquee tag.

  • wpm
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  • 2 hours ago
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Doesn't Solaris still live on as the illumos distributions? Tribblix still has SPARC64 builds.
> Memory: 56MiB / 1024MiB

This is the beefiest SPARC I have ever seen. Very cool this is running. Getting this set up is no easy feat if you haven't tried before. Props to OP

> This is the beefiest SPARC I have ever seen

My sarcasm detector came defective from the factory, and I've always struggled with getting it to work effectively.

So, if you aren't being sarcastic: 20 years ago, place I worked had a Sun Fire 15K. They supported max 576GB of RAM. Don't remember how much ours had, it probably wasn't a maxxed out config, but I'm sure it was a lot more than 1GB. The machine cost over $1 million dollars.

Uhh, Yes? It is literally probably what this machine was doing in 2001.

(Source: guy who hosted websites on sparc's in 1995)

I remember SPARC being the mainstay of webhosting. It seems weird for this question to be posed.

UltraSparc smoked Intel at web server response times because it could handle so many more threads for Apache.

They even made CPU with a uarch specifically for webservers in the mid 2000s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1 The VHDL was later published under the GPL.
I don't think it's necessarily a dumb question; yes SPARC machines were used all over the web in the 90's and 2000's, but the web has changed a lot in the last twenty years. If nothing else, I could see not being able to find a recent-enough TLS package being an issue.

I realize that reading through the article that they did get OpenBSD working on there and yeah if you can get a modern OS on there it will probably work fine, but I don't think the core question of "Can my SPARC server host a website?" is dumb.

> I don't think it's necessarily a dumb question

It's not a dumb question, but OP didn't answer it. Cloudflare is fronting the website. So we don't know if the server is handling the entire traffic, nor if it's using TLS between it and Cloudflare.

I do enjoy this, but the title is such clickbait. I was running websites on a sparc 2 back in 1995.
Someone got a website to be served from some airbuds so a Sparc server, which is literally where we served websites from in the 90s, should be pretty easy
Yes.
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  • 2 hours ago
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This is what websites ran on back in 2001! It doesn't seem like much of a stretch to host a website on one, especially one that resembles a 2001-era site.
Somewhat sad OP is using cloud flare. If it was 2001 you'd just have it with some basic firewall appliance in-front of it.
Now imagine a beowolf cluster of these.
it can but if it gets too much traffic it might sparc
I’m starting to get tired of these old hardware or minimally powered hardware hosting website posts. It’s not that novel anymore.
  • 0xWTF
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  • 6 hours ago
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You're welcome to not read, but as someone who grew up in a certain era, it's pretty cool to see the old things. The webpage he's serving reminds me of all sorts of early internet things, where the knowledge was real and we were just pushing it onto this new thing. The actual site: https://sparc.rup12.net/ has a vibe similar to https://johnlind.tripod.com/, which is incredible. The knowledge is timeless.

> Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or higher

I feel young again...

It’s more subtle to me: I’ll never say no to retrocomputing (especially what you need to open yourself to the public internet without getting pwned), but “use a low end VPN and save $$$$!” is a bit old now.
I do not mind retro computing stuff. The most interesting part was installing up-to-date OpenBSD. But of course it can serve a static website.
Would have loved to see how it holds up with some load via FastCGI and CGI (via slowcgi(8)), since httpd(8) can be used with both of them.
The question as posed in the title is novel because it violates Betteridge's law of headlines:

> "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

I'd rather see stuff like this than an LLM spicy take on the front page. JMO, YMMV.

  • api
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  • 6 hours ago
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Why would anyone not think a Sparc server could host a web site?

An old IBM PC or even a Commodore 64 can host a web site. I think there’s a few online. I’ve seen them before.

I’ve seen a lot of younger “cloud native” age developers who have these insane distorted ideas about how much power is needed to do simple things. You’d be shocked at how much traffic a modern mid range laptop can handle with efficient software. The Ethernet card you can plug into it would probably be the bottleneck, since I’m not sure if they make USB-C cards faster than 5gbps.

A mid range laptop will also handle hundreds of gigs in a SQL database just fine.

If the mid range laptop happens to have a Thunderbolt/USB4 port there are a number of Thunderbolt adapters built around Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx SFP28 NICs.
At least it's not some, "AI makes me feel like a kid again" jagoff.