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Can my SPARC server host a website?
- dlcarrier 8mo agoThat loaded faster than most pages I visit. Also, excellent use of the marquee tag.
- gregatragenet3 8mo agoUhh, Yes? It is literally probably what this machine was doing in 2001. (Source: guy who hosted websites on sparc's in 1995)
- happymellon 8mo agoI 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.
- formerly_proven 8mo agoThey even made CPU with a uarch specifically for webservers in the mid 2000s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1 The VHDL was later published under the GPL.
- tombert 8mo agoI 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.
- tredre3 8mo ago> 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.
- fred_is_fred 8mo agoSomewhat sad OP is using cloud flare. If it was 2001 you'd just have it with some basic firewall appliance in-front of it.
- anonzzzies 8mo agoOf 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.
- cebert 8mo agoI’m starting to get tired of these old hardware or minimally powered hardware hosting website posts. It’s not that novel anymore.
- 0xWTF 8mo agoYou'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/ https://sparc.rup12.net/ has a vibe similar to https://johnlind.tripod.com/ https://johnlind.tripod.com/, which is incredible. The knowledge is timeless. > Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or higher I feel young again...
- nxobject 8mo agoIt’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.
- alexjplant 8mo agoThe 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 8mo agoWhy 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.
- throwaway5465 8mo agoNow imagine a beowolf cluster of these.
- fortran77 8mo agoThis 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.
- latchkey 8mo agoI do enjoy this, but the title is such clickbait. I was running websites on a sparc 2 back in 1995.
- dmd 8mo ago27 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.
- LeFantome 8mo agoAgreed. 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?
- tokyobreakfast 8mo ago> 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.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Uvix 8mo agoWere 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.)
- charcircuit 8mo agoHe offloads TLS to the Proxmox server within their home network. TLS is used between that server and Cloudflare to keep everything safe during transport.
- baobrien 8mo agoRecent OpenBSD should be able to do modern TLS, and probably ACME, which would have been more interesting.
- effnorwood 8mo agoit can but if it gets too much traffic it might sparc
- actionfromafar 8mo agoYes.
- jjav 8mo agoAs 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.
- zzzeek 8mo agoSomeone 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
- tokyobreakfast 8mo agoInteresting 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.
- cyberpunk 8mo agoIt’s also Theo’s favourite architecture, afaik he was mostly working on SPARC back on NetBSD before the fork. I’d expect it to well supported for a while longer, even if practically no one else uses it.
- rurban 8mo agoCalling strict alignment requirements "beloved" is a wide stretch. You had to split loops into Sparc and Ubsan, vs normal variants.
- lacoolj 8mo ago> 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
- skissane 8mo ago> 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.
- lacoolj 8mo agoI only ever played with a sparcstation 5, and mine had a whopping 128MB and felt like room to spare.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- wpm 8mo agoDoesn't Solaris still live on as the illumos distributions? Tribblix still has SPARC64 builds.
- pjmlp 8mo agoFirst Solaris still lives on as Solaris, it was the very first UNIX to have hardware memory tagging to tame C. And yes, there are a couple of distributions based on OpenSolaris, one of them powers Oxide infrastructure.
- monkpit 8mo agoSlightly 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.
- sitzkrieg 8mo agoits incredibly uninteresting and marks the perfect point to close the tab and go back to something enriching
- dwedge 8mo agoI agree. I thought this was really interesting until I got to the point of them needing to fire up an assistant to write basic Apache config - ok fine maybe they were just introducing the assistant - but the next paragraph they were talking about using multiple agents for this despite not knowing why. I gave up at that point, it's not even slightly interesting for me
- arjie 8mo agoCloudflare 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.
- cube00 8mo ago> Network isolation: The Cloudflare tunnel creates an outbound-only connection, so no inbound ports are exposed on my home network 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.
- bdcravens 8mo agoYes, though some modern frameworks etc may struggle with the resources on an older machine.
- realaaa 8mo agoyes indeed, not everything needs a hyper-scale cluster and k8s and cloudflare etc !
- ruptwelve 8mo agoAuthor here: Thank you for posting this link! And I see the sentiment: "Of course it can, it was built for that"! And I fully agree! My clickbaity title was meant to be in the spirit of 2026. Exposing an older server (although not an old OS) to the internet and all it's nasties was not something I would lightly do. But this old Netra does a good job! I guess the Cloudflare tunnel is a bit of cheating here, but I did not feel comfortable exposing something running at home. So CF came in clutch. 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!