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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
(Source: guy who hosted websites on sparc's in 1995)
UltraSparc smoked Intel at web server response times because it could handle so many more threads for Apache.
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.
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.
> Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or higher
I feel young again...
> "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.
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.