It has been one of my longtime dreams to run a Sun workstation as my personal computer — not as a device to browse the Internet but to keep serious stuff in and not required to upgrade the OS every other day to keep viruses and zero-day exploits out. I have grown up with Wintel machines all the way from x86 with just BASICA on tap to the modern-day Core-i9 with a ton of compatible hardware at your beck and call. But the guys running big iron on the other end of the country were always our envy. UNIX workstations that don’t need to be rebooted for months was part of that legend.
I am not breaking any ground when I say that computers have become an essential part of our lives. But this intermingling of technology and life is not without its side effects. It takes less than five minutes for an unpatched, firewall-less computer to attract its first unsolicited remote access request. If some rogue Chinese company could allegedly slip a chip or two on Apple’s server room motherboards, what protection do you and I have? The sanest method of protection is to accept that privacy is nonexistent on computing devices. And for the other times, to keep your personal banking and important data secure, what you really need is a computer that has no way of communicating with the Internet, especially through Wi-Fi.
The next question is, why Sun and not Wintel machines? There are numerous early x86 computers with no onboard Ethernet. They are cheap as chips and if something doesn’t work, replacement parts are readily available. The Sun machines were simply the Rolls-Royce of yesteryear computing. There was little comparison between Sun and Wintel in terms of hardware and software unity. x86 is as buggy as it gets. The situation is very different today. The famed BSOD of Windows is really a distant memory and the big iron hardware is going extinct. The dictum is “don’t buy ancient x86 hardware unless it is for purely vanity reasons”.
The Sun Blade system is a hybrid system with a PCI bus for peripherals. It’s a half-way house with big-iron brains and Wintel-inspired peripherals. That opens up a large array of compatible hardware — if drivers are available. But at least the hardware is generally available and affordable. I waited for a long time and finally found a new-old Sun Blade 100 workstation equipped with a 500MHz UltraSparc IIi processor, 256MB RAM, 2x 40G hard drives, CDROM drive, and an additional Ethernet+SCSI card thrown in. The RAM was upgradeable up to 2GB with commodity parts. The price was not cringe-worthy and it seemed like a good buy.
Nothing goes to plan
When you buy on eBay across borders, you should buy only from vendors who have 1000+ positive reviews and you should be willing to send stuff back if it doesn’t meet your expectations. If you do not have this discipline combined with patience, you have no right to be on eBay, which, I have to admit, I do not possess. When I opened the package, I was surprised to find a Blade 150. It was not new, as promised, but I was willing to accept the change because of the 50MHz speed bump. My first computer was blazing at 4MHz and I know that 50MHz made a hell of a lot of difference. That was a huge mistake.
When I hooked the system up and turned it on, the CDROM would light up but wouldn’t boot. It was a complete dud. By now I had already invested so much time that the system appeared to be a technical challenge rather than a bad buy. The CDROM will be used only for installing the OS and will not be required further. So the challenge really was to get jumpstart net-install up and running.
It took me a good week to get another system running Solaris and configured as a jumpstart server to boot the Blade. At least that was not time badly spent. I learned a lot about how the Sparc machines boot and load the OS. I managed to load the remote bootloader over the network but the install kernel wouldn’t load. I spent a further week fiddling with NFS and other settings to get things moving. None worked. By that time the additional RAM I had ordered arrived and I realized one of the 128Mb sticks that came with the system was a dud! I later realized both the sticks were duds!
Replacing the RAM got the install kernel up and running remotely but the install still stalled after some time. Some install guides wrote about the Sparc system going to sleep and requiring a ping to wake up. Didn’t work. Some guides advised ditching the crossover cable and connecting through a switch. Didn’t work. I again thought that the NFS mounts were at fault and spent a few days with different settings. None worked. By this time the replacement DVD-ROM that I had already ordered arrived. When I replaced the drive, the system was booting the install CDs. Hooray! Light at the end. Not quite.
The installs were still stalling after loading the kernel. I figured they stalled during modprobe for hardware and somewhere buried in the scrolls was the fact that the installs stalled after probing the add-on PCI card for Ethernet+SCSI. When I finally removed the PCI Ethernet+SCSI card the installation went on to complete successfully. That card was a dud too (OpenBSD kernel confirmed it later).
The first successful install of Solaris 9 was a moment to celebrate, but the fireworks didn't stop yet. During the first boot of the installed system, Solaris threw a message that the HDD was faulty and would soon fail. The Disk rack on CDE was red-lighting all the time and the sound in the room was unbearable. It was the sound of a PATA drive on its deathbed. Time to retire the primary HDD. The second install went on smoothly and the workstation has been on all the time ever since.
Happy Ending
The system is now humming along nicely, running OpenBSD and FVWM. I have set up a Mikrotik router as a WiFi-to-Ethernet bridge to connect to the outside world when required — usually to install additional packages. Of all the operating systems I have used, OpenBSD has the simplest and most straight-forward administrative mechanism. After all these changes, I realize that the Sun Blade 100 is a wonderful machine — extremely well built, and dependable for a 10+-year-old system.
Advice to retrocomputing enthusiasts
Strip the computer of all the add-ons and test the motherboard with just a handful of essential peripherals. RAM, CDROM, and a single HDD should suffice. Then add peripherals one after the other after successful installation of the base system.
