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.
Thank you for saying this. I read this article a few days ago and felt the same: it's a 64-bit gigahertz-class RISC purporse designed internet server with a gig of RAM, running a current OS released less than 4 months ago.
OF COURSE it can host a website. A hundred active ones at once, I should think.
Aix, HP-UX and Solaris, alongside Windows NT/2000 were our production server operating systems.
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.
While inbound ports are not exposed you're still responding to incoming traffic so theoretically if someone can find a zero day in httpd nothing is anymore "network isolated" then if you had port 80 exposed to the world.
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.
As for the hardware, yeah 1GB of RAM on a 2001 server, kits it out nicely! But even with that, I tried to limit what is running there so the server would actually work smoothly. (I even compiled a few Rust binaries, and yeah that took ages).
My old hardware collection has plenty of other candidates for hosting a website. So expect more!
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.
And yes, there are a couple of distributions based on OpenSolaris, one of them powers Oxide infrastructure.
Also, excellent use of the marquee tag.
> Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or higher
I feel young again...
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.
> "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.
