Sun Enterprise E250

Give the server back, La'Quan.

Well that's the plan for now since I can't do shit with it.
It will became a gamer PC in a heavy case.

>the software
I've been looking for the RSC soft and I can't find it
I'll give it a try on TPB lol

>le ebin gutted case for gaming
please no user, sell it to someone who would make it work. don't become a redditor

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>this thing has no value
Oh but it does. This machine was made before backdoors were made mandatory. These days you cannot even trust an Ethernet adapter.

It's a nice case... build to last.
I'll give it a try for a couple of weeks.
With luck I'll meet someone who knows it way around that kind of hardware or get help here. I'll go chek how much an asci terminal cost...

Post picks of ports in the back

FINALLY SOMEONE ELSE WITH AN E250
>1 looks like it's for admin use with Sun Remote System Control (RSC)
If you don't have the username and password for the RSC, forget about using it. The utility for it can only be used from Solaris too, so unless you get a working copy of Solaris running on the thing you won't be able to use it. Luckily it just mirrors the serial port.
>the other ports are probably the network card (total nub here) so maybe i can hook something there and start looking around

There's three different ways of managing this system:
1) RSC: You don't have access to that
2) Sun keyboard and mouse and a display hooked up to a PCI Framebuffer. If your system has a VGA or 13w3 port, that means it has the framebuffer. If you have a Sun DIN keyboard and you plug it into the keyboard port, the E250 should put out an image through the framebuffer.
3) Serial port: This is probably the one you want to go for. The E250 presents an OpenBoot console if you send a BREAK signal through serial port A. To connect to it you'll need a computer with a serial port or a serial to USB adapter, a null modem cable and a 25 pin to 9 pin serial adapter. Settings are 9600 baud, 8 bits and no parity. If you can't get anything out of the serial port, it probably means its output has been redirected to the RSC. In this case, you'll have to take the IDPROM (location detailed in the manual, it's freely available online from Oracle) out, boot the system, put the IDPROM back in, set the NVRAM variable responsible for console output back to the serial port, and reboot. I had to do that on mine.
>I'm just doing this for fun, this thing has no value so its the perfect toy.
I'll probably end up keeping the case tho haha it's a beast

Please, do not destroy such a system, they are pieces of history and perfectly usable nowadays with some upgrades and a bit of patience. Pic is a neofetch of mine, running Debian (almost) 24/7 and doing homeserver duty.
(Cont)

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It has 2 pci cards

the RSC card with the rj45 port
(the 1st card on the really bad pic)

and the main network card with 4 rj45 ports
(like the one at the bottom of the slots)

and 1 power supply, not 2

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what do you expect it to be able to do? this is pretty much a collector's item
might be able to serve a basic webpage, host a mumble server or an irc bouncer, but it will be noisy as you probably noticed and consume a lot more power than a modern alternative, not to mention that you as a normalfag are probably not into these things.
that said how the fuck do you expect to use the case with modern hardware? you'll have to make a bunch of holes in the metal panel in the back and fix the motherboard, psu and hard drive in place with fucking hot glue or something. everything is non standard in there.
btw even if you had a video card don't expect to see a vga out, these things most of the time use proprietary connectors so you will need an adapter to connect it to a monitor.
the RSC thing is a long shot, this must have a serial connector somewhere that you can use with an usb adapter to connect to a modern pc
this machine is kinda similar to yours I think
youtube.com/watch?v=B5PjuEK1k6U

Welp, you definitely don't have the framebuffer then.
Your best bet is connecting via the serial port.
You'll need to know your way around OpenBoot:
docs.oracle.com/cd/E19457-01/801-7042/801-7042.pdf

You'll probably want to reinstall Solaris on it if you want to use it in its original form, or install a SPARC-compatible version of GNU/Linux. As I noted in my previous post, I run Debian with no issues on mine.

I made a video about my particular E250 a while ago describing its hardware features. It may help you figure out yours.
youtube.com/watch?v=hnUl_im3Vzw&t=574s

>might be able to serve a basic webpage, host a mumble server or an irc bouncer
Mine has modern SATA disks connected via an 8 port sata PCI-X controller and it currently runs as a seedbox with more than 100 active torrents, hosts a Minecraft server, acts as a NAS with SAMBA, NFS and netatalk, and acts as a TFTP, bootparamd and rarpd server for boting other Sun machines and Macintoshes off the network. These things were $25k in their top end config, they can still do a lot of things today.

sorry you have to pay Oracle $900k a month for support to be able to do that

oh yeah! thank you!!
great post

Ok I'll forget about the RSC and get me an old pc with a serial port, thank you so much for saving me some time and providing solutions.

I'll get back to you when I make progress.

One last thing,
how can I shut it down safely? cause right now all i can do is turn the switch back the off position... I suppose its not a safe way so can i can around that?

I've got a pair of E450s, they're old and obsolete as fuck. Only thing I could get running well on them besides Solaris was OpenBSD.

Oh and best use I found for them was to prop up a nice chunk of laminate counter top, made a nice desk or table thing for plants.

No problem.

If you don't have an access to a console in the OS I'm afraid the only way you can shut it down is by turning the key to the off position. Solaris is a pretty resilient OS, it should handle forceful shutdowns with no issue.
By the way, I forgot to mention: If you boot the system into Diagnostics Mode (Spanner icon on the keyswitch), it should take you straight to OpenBoot.
One question: If you let it boot fully (Give it around ten minutes or so), does the heartbeat light start pulsing? Because if it does, that means you have a working install of Solaris on there.
You must be doing something wrong then.

>Spanner icon on the keyswitch
Fuck, I was thinking about a different system. I meant the icon with the heartbeat line on it, the rightmost one.

>what do you expect it to be able to do?

Frankly I picked it up for the case, I can drill holes in there np and use the power supply case to mount a modern psu. Anyway, I can make this work np.

I have a custom power supply project going on and I could put it in there... its roomy

But I'll give ressurection a fair shot.
So far it's been running for like 12h and it looks ok.
but then again, I cant get feedback so who knows

I guess i could put something on it but by todays standard those 6 18gig scsi disk are not that big.

Thanks again, your posts are very helpful

yep the top right led is flashing
left one is on
all the hd leds are on too

They're built to be administrated remotely or through a serial console, just pick up a null modem cable and hook it up to something with a terminal emulator, from there you can get it set up with an operating system and use SSH or telnet thereafter. These systems shipped with anything from Solaris 2.5.1 to 9 from the factory, but they'll more than likely run 10 just fine if you want something easy. There's also Linux and BSD, but if you're just looking for fun I'd go with Solaris since it's a more novel experience and just as functional for a lot of jobs thanks to OpenCSW, plus you get access to Sun compilers.

I've always wanted an E250 or similar to put to work as a network server for supporting other legacy systems, UltraSPARC IIs were hardly the fastest even in their day but as that other guy ITT demonstrates they're still quite well-designed systems that can do a lot of useful work if you give them the chance.

But yeah, like everyone else is saying, don't gut this thing. It would take more effort than it's worth to do it right and it's not really that great a case for a PC anyway with its size and undoubtedly terrible airflow patterns designed around processors with less TDP than some modern mobile chips. Plus, the unique architecture and hardware are why most of us actually appreciate these systems, build a sleeper in an NOS beige case, you'll get the same attention and appreciation from those kinds of people without people like us chastising you for destroying something we'd love just the way it is.
Sun systems were practically the backbone of the early internet, people were doing way more than that on single-processor UE1s, let alone a 250.
You could probably pick up some 146 or 300GB disks pretty easily nowadays. I run an 18 and a 73 in my own legacy Unix box and it's more than enough for my own needs.

are both sockets always populated or is it an optional thing?

Great, that means it's all working! You just need to get a console into it and most likely reinstall the OS. Solaris ISOs are available here:
ftp://69.43.38.172/mirrors/Unix/Sun/
Debian ISOs here:
cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/current/sparc64/iso-cd/

Also listen to this user Mine's booting off a modern 147GB disk.
You can even get SATA cards that will boot under OpenBoot.

Dual processors were an option on the E250, the lowest end model came only with one. The speed bump from the second processor is very noticeable, at least on my dual 400MHz system.

planning on posting it on here ?reddit.com/r/sleeperbattlestations/

You could configure them either single or dual, I couldn't tell you what the most common option would be for that, though. The E250 was a very expensive system, but among big iron SPARC systems it was still entry-level especially after the 150 got EOL'd, so I bet a lot of single-socket configurations sold to people looking more for the expansion capabilities than processing power. Only way to tell without a console though is to pop it open, and you could probably upgrade to duals if you really wanted to, but for a lot of tasks you probably wouldn't need to.

This might be interesting to you if you're looking for general information:
shrubbery.net/~heas/sun-feh-2_1/Systems/E250/E250.html

Great, thanks again for the help.
I'll get a wire and see how it goes.
You saved one old dual lol gratz

>You must be doing something wrong then.
I dunno only fucked with them for a few days nearly 10 years ago. Was going to do NetBSD since it "runs on anything" but apparently anything doesn't include Sparc64 or whatever. OpenBSD did though. Also of course the old SunOS or Solaris shit it came with. Had a pile of tape drives adn keyboards and monitors for them too, unfortunately the only USB keyboard was the type 6 with the Ctrl key in the wrong place, the type 5s were all that weird ass proprietary connector, so not overly useful. Had various boxed software and manuals too, but I eventually got rid of that shit since it was just taking up space.

Anyway figured wasn't worth the electricity to run them since I had no real use for them, only get them as a curiosity from some company that was tossing them out.

They sure are fucking aesthetic though.

>Sun systems were practically the backbone of the early internet
and in the 80s you could shitpost from a floppy drive and a 30 mhz computer. irrelevant
OP if you think it'd make a good case for modern hardware go for it. don't listen to the s󠀀oyboys who are telling you it can be used today just because they're emotionally attached to some old computers that are useless today.
if it actually was so valuable they'd be willing to pay for it, but pro tip: they're not

You can also probably just boot it into single-user and clear the root password if it's already got an operating system on it. You'd probably still want to re-install eventually of course, but some forensics are always fun and it's great to get a bit of a feel for it.
Most NetBSD ports are pretty half-assed and barely tested. It runs on anything, but that doesn't mean it runs well.
Lots of projection here and you're definitely just looking for easy attention, but I probably would blow $200-$300 on a loaded E250 if I was looking for an example and didn't already have a good SysV server.

I dont use plebbit, only Jow Forums and I never posted a pic of me or my stuff online.

it's a dual, and i think they are 300mhz cpu
all the mem banks are populated so that's cool.

I closed it before booting tho. There was a case switch so i figure it wouldnt like to boot with the case open.

Damn, sounds like it was probably a pretty expensive configuration, then. The 400 MHz USIIs were a later option, so dual 300s were the best you could get. If it were my system I'd probably pour over the date codes on the components to try and see when it shipped for the fuck of it, but I think Sun also threw a date on everything out of the factory, I can't remember.

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then why the fuck would you spend time modifying a case to fit non compatible hardware just because of how it looks?

you're using sub-optimal equipment that wastes lots of space, time and electricity for something that would run on a $20 raspberry pi. how is that projection?

Perhaps he just likes it and doesn't feel he could make use of it in any other way.

Your post was full of strawmen and ad hominem attacks pulled out of your ass, it’s pretty obvious you just want attention and aren’t trying to actually discuss anything, you’re just saying whatever stupid and inflammatory shit comes to mind because you know people will reply
to you to call you a moron.

Nobody ITT cares about saving $10 of electricity or shaving off a few milliseconds of execution time on some mundane non-essential task.

Dual 300s should make for quite a nice system. If you really want to fiddle with Solaris graphically you could throw in any old PCI USB card (so you can use it with any keyboard/mouse) and a framebuffer. My recommendation is a Sun XVR-600, which can be connected to everything from VGA CRTs to HDMI TVs via cheap adapters, it also seems to be the cheapest framebuffer to get. It wasn't officially supported on the E250 but it'll work perfectly fine, talking from experience here.
>There was a case switch so i figure it wouldnt like to boot with the case open.
Yup, it won't boot with the case open, in fact it will hard-shutdown if you open the case while it's running.
I remember jamming a screwdriver in the hole to keep the switch pressed in mine while I was troubleshooting it. Fun times.
Chill down, he said he'd do it if it didn't work.
>you're using sub-optimal equipment that wastes lots of space, time and electricity for something that would run on a $20 raspberry pi. how is that projection?
I'm the one using the E250.
I have the space, so I don't care about that.
It uses around 100W of power constantly, most of its rated power draw originally came from the hard disks, which I've replaced with modern ones.
And tell me, how exactly would I connect three SATA drives to a Raspberry Pi in a way that would allow me to saturate a Gigabit connection like the E250 does? The Pi doesn't even have Gigabit Ethernet or SATA ports, and the only way to add those is via USB, which is one hell of a bottleneck in this case (and even more so considering the fact that its four USB ports are connected to a single port internally). The E250 has PCI slots, I could even add 10GbE to it if I felt like it. Oh, and the E250 has twice as much RAM as the Pi
And by the way, my E250 cost €25. Sure, I spent a lot more in the SATA controller, the Gigabit Ethernet controller and the disks. But I'd have to buy those too if I were to use a Pi.

I think it's a 2000.
I'll do that if i can use it.

It's ugly but build to last, like my old antec lansing heavy cases but the interesting part is the room in there. I'm building a psu for fun, one I can repair easily and this case would be perfect for that and more project. Ever changed capacitors? It's a pain when there's no room. On top of that there's room for a second power supply I could use to power fans on a seperate smaller psu. Damn fans make psu blow if you touch them while they're on. Anyway, I hate fans.

Give it back jamal

>I'm a windows fag
Give up.

I main Winshit and I’m probably more competent in a Unix-like environment than 80% of the functionally illiterate Ubuntu/Mint/Arch casuals on Jow Forums that barely know how to work a compiler without a wiki guide to hold their hand.

I just upgraded to windows 7
bye bye XP snif snif

all i remember from when I was on unix is RM *

>Nobody ITT cares about saving $10 of electricity or shaving off a few milliseconds of execution time on some mundane non-essential task.
I'm not talking about the extra time those tasks will take (not just miliseconds lmao), I'm talking about the multiple hours you'll spend configuring openBSD to run on an old obscure CPU architecture.
Per cnet.com/g00/products/sun-enterprise-250-ultrasparc-ii-400-mhz-monitor-none-series/, the
"operational" power consumption is 720 watts.
Let's assume you only run it at 50% load and power scales linearly (it doesn't, there's always an idle constant, so in reality this calculation will be true for running it at 20%-30%).
That's 360 watts.
Assuming an average of 12 cents per kwh in the US:
1000wh 0.12
360wh x
x=0.0432 dollars per hour
Multiplied by 8760 hours in a year:
8760 * 0.0432 = 378 dollars per year
you could get a dual core hp dc7800 for $60 and you get a warranty, gigabit ethernet, 6 sata connectors on the board, you wouldn't have to buy a sata controller and network controller, you'd get at least the same or more memory (2gb), more processing power, compatibility with standard keyboard and mouse, you wouldn't need to buy a video card and a video adaptor or a serial adaptor, and you would get 6 usb ports for any extra stuff, a free modern 256gb hard drive, a max power consumption of 240watts instead of 720, and you aren't limited to openBSD, Solaris or poorly supported Linux archs.

>Damn fans make psu blow if you touch them while they're on
never heard about that tbqh

who cares you stupid autist

>the "operational" power consumption is 720 watts
That's straight up wrong. It has two 360W PSUs in an N+1 redundancy configuration, which means you can run it on one, meaning the system pulls 360W at the very most.
As I said before, and if you had taken the time to read my post, the power consumption is 100W with modern hard drives. Always around that figure, since the CPUs don't have any power saving features.
>you could get a dual core hp dc7800 for $60 and blah blah blah...
I wish you good luck shoving eight disks in that thing. The E250 does it with no issue.
>you wouldn't have to buy a sata controller and network controller
The SATA adapter is a Supermicro SAT2-MV8. It cost me €12. The Gigabit network controller is an Intel PRO/1000MT, it cost me €3.
That's €40 (US$45) for the system without disks.
>you wouldn't need to buy a video card and a video adaptor or a serial adaptor,
I already had a shitload of serial adapters laying around, and in case I needed a framebuffer I could use the XVR-600 I have in my SunFire 280R. That card cost me €6, so it'd still be cheaper system cost.
>and you would get 6 usb ports for any extra stuff
Thank you, but I think having two free PCI slots, eight SATA ports and eight drive bays is more than enough expansion room. Or who knows, maybe I'll change my mind, in which case I'll simply buy a cheap PCI USB card.
>a free modern 256gb hard drive
Not so free when the total system cost is 15 dollars more, is it?
>a max power consumption of 240watts instead of 720
Actually, the HP would be closer to 70W idling and 150W at full load, while the E250 is around 100W all the time.
>and you aren't limited to openBSD, Solaris or poorly supported Linux archs
So I can run Windows or macOS on a server? Why would I want to do that?
And by the way, I can tell you sparc64 support on Debian is excellent as far as non-x86 goes, just behind ARM and ppc64. So far everything I've tried to do has worked perfectly.

>use old, loud, power hungry dinosaur that barely runs a GUI because of an emotional attachment to an obsolete kind of computer
>not autistic
pick one and only one boyo

Considering you’re citing Cnet when actual Sun documentation and even first-hand measurements have been posted ITT by people who actually own these systems I honestly don’t think you know much about “configuring” an operating system or anything else you’re talking about, really. Can you go back to the home server threads and blog some more about your raspberry pi media server while the adults with experience relevant to this topic talk?

We know what a cheap core 2 machine can do, most of us have several of those too, and don’t really care because this is a technology board for people who enjoy technology, not finding the most minimal/cheapest solution to playing games and watching porn/anime.

wow, t󠀀bh it's actually impressive you managed to get that stuff for so cheap
the machine I understand you might've got lucky and find it dumpster diving, but where did you find those cards? was it before that kind of hardware started to become rare?

who cares you stupid autist

or is it just x86 compatible PCI stuff?

you seem to care since you bothered responding to it

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just for curiosity, is there a way to run both PSUs at once or does the extra one just kick in when the primary one stops working? if so what's the consumption when both are turned on?
>since the CPUs don't have any power saving features
I would've guessed all the extra parts of the CPU that are used when actually running stuff would still increase the power consumption in a significant way as compared to just running NOPs

so like that other guy said you are basically just looking for attention then since you’re too dumb to get it by actually contributing to a thread? good point, I shouldn’t encourage your behavior

let this stupid autist rot everyone

>but where did you find those cards?
The SAT2-MV8 on ebay, they still go for around that much. Same with the XVR-600, though that was a local auction and I was the only bidder.
The Ethernet card I got with another identical one, both NOS, at a thrift store. But these are cheap nowadays too, dual port versions tend to go for little above $10 on ebay.
>was it before that kind of hardware started to become rare?
These are very late PCI/PCI-X cards, I wouldn't say they're rare yet. Maybe the XVRs are getting a bit more scarce these days, but that's it.
Oh, PCI is architecture-agnostic, so the cards are just their regular versions. Of course this means I can't netboot off the gigabit Ethernet card or boot off the SATA card, but that's why I store my /boot partition on a 147GB SCSI disk. and the rest of my system on a SATA disk. Once the kernel is booted and the system is running off the SATA disk, an init script spins down the SCSI disk.
Of course the XVR-600 is Sun specific and it's not x86-compatible at all.

I have to go to bed so I'll present my last argument: I do this for fun. I have a lot more fun messing around with these machines than I do with generic x86 shitboxes. It's as simple as that, it's not really a rational thing.

Both PSUs are always on if you have them plugged in. I've never measured the power consumption with both supplies running, but due to the drop in efficiency and the power draw of the second supply itself, around 175W off the wall might be a safe assumption.

>I would've guessed all the extra parts of the CPU that are used when actually running stuff would still increase the power consumption in a significant way as compared to just running NOPs
And that's probably true, but think about what I'm doing with my system. Even if most of the time it doesn't even reach 80% CPU load, the CPUs don't exactly have much free time to spend doing NOPs.

yup, sounds about right

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They do. A fan can send back nasty voltage if you interrupt it. It's a coil and a magnet connected to your system. Mess with this and all kind of bad things will happen. Sometimes the pc will just crash but the PSU can die from it. I've seen it just last week. A dick decided to clean his vid card fans while everything was on... so he go in there with a q-tips and wiggle it, once, twice, and then boom! 2 busted caps in the psu. The psu was just a couple of months old rosewill 650w performance. Try it with an old PC, at your own risk.

It’s pretty easy to get used to. If you make another thread when you get your hands on a null modem cable there’s plenty of us around that would be happy to help you get it set up with whatever. There’s an FTP site with both Solaris images and Sun Studio compilers I’ll see if I can link when I get back home.

If you’ve got a DVD reader to attach to it for a little while I’d probably throw Solaris 10 10/09 (update 8) on it, it’s the last Sun branded version and also ships standard with StarOffice, which is pretty nice.

I went through a couple semesters of university doing most of my note taking/document stuff on a Fire V100, it was great experience.

comfy thread

Yes, there's a dvd in it. I'll get a cable asap and engage. Thanks a lot for all the help. I'll get back here for sure.

Perfect.

Here's the FTP site I mentioned: ftp://ftp.deu.edu.tr/pub/Solaris/
The Solaris images on there other than 9 9/05 are all Oracle branded, and they lack some of the desktop software Sun used to bundle like the aforementioned StarOffice. Maybe not as meaningful for a server, but you can still X forward those applications over or otherwise set up an X terminal, I also always figured a nice pedestal system like that would make a cool host to hang Sun Rays off of, which are Sun/Oracle's own proprietary SPARC/MIPS-based thin clients.

But the reason I like this archive is because of the software on it, there's a huge sunfreeware mirror that looks like it goes back to Solaris 2.5, an OpenCSW mirror and a whole shitload of Sun packages and other random things, and also more importantly a copy of Sun Studio 12 in the ISO directory. It's always good to have the vendor compilers on systems like these, sometimes they can blow GCC out of the water depending on the workload.

As for what I mentioned before for an operating system, Solaris 10 10/09 is here: ftp://69.43.38.172/mirrors/Unix/Sun/sol-10-u8/
I don't think that system would have any problems running it, Solaris 9 is also perfectly reasonable and I think OpenCSW still hosts packages for it.

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cool thread