Breathing New Life into Old Servers

A show of hands...

How many of you still have old PC's, servers, consoles and all other manner of bits and pieces lying around in your closet, loft or basement gathering dust?

Chances are if you're anything like me, there are quite a few of you. I run my own network from home and this involves hosting my own Web servers and portals, and all for a fraction of the price it would cost me to rent server space in a dedicated data center.

A word of caution before we begin. It's more than likely that your business has a robust connection to the Internet, but most home broadband packages are not really designed for this kind of use. And a lot of ISP's frown upon it, so check the small print in your ISP agreement first, a lot of them can and will shut your connection down if they perceive you are using too much bandwidth.

Also remember that the kind of setup I'm going to describe is not designed to host a site that's going to command as much traffic as Google.

So, what's this all about then?

I recently had to set up an SMS/MMS processing platform for a project I was working on. All I needed was something that would be lightly used, but was a public facing server (so that my SMS provider could send SMS to me), but as it was just a test set-up I needed to do this with as little a budget as possible.

As I've already mentioned I run my own test/development servers from my own premises, and I've actually fitted my loft out as a small data centre to accommodate everything. This meant that I already had a static IP on my broadband connection (Demon Home Office 8000 Package if you live in the UK) so all I needed was a server.

A Sun Server's New Dawn

After raking about through various pieces of old kit, I came across an unused Sun Netra T1 105. The entire device is about the same size and dimensions as a 16-inch Pizza box and is powered by a 350Mz 64Bit UltraSparc V9 Super Scalar CPU. In order to get the unit working I needed some memory for it and some hard drives.

A quick trip to eBay made sure I was able to find the drives and after a bit of patient searching I managed to secure two refurbished 19GB Drives for the system for £25 Gbp (approx 35 dollars), for the memory I found an old memory card containing 256 MB in a box of other parts, and tried it in the Netra at which point I was able to power the device up.

There's still a lot of information floating around for these old machines, and many of them are still in good working order. In the past I've resurrected Cobalt Raq3's, Sun Netra's, and more recently some older Dell PowerEdge and IBM Netfinity servers. Doing a search in Google for the Netra turned up a lot of useful sites who have a lot of information on old Sun hardware a good one is Obsolyte.

Another useful place is often the original manufacturers site, in the case of Sun they still have available all the original documentation for the Netra in the document archives.

In the case of the Netra I also had a couple of other challenges. Firstly, the Sun Netra is a headless machine, and like many rack devices, it has only a serial console on the rear. Thankfully I had a Cisco serial cable on hand as my switch is a Cisco and the Netra's console port is wired the same. The second problem to overcome was the CD used to install the operating system.

The model I have is not fitted with the internal IDE system to install a DVD drive; it does however have an ultra wide SCSI port on the back. Again, I was lucky I had a cable or two lying round in my cable box (it's always worth keeping strange cables). I found a narrow SCSI2 to SCSI1 armored cable that fit the port on the back of the Netra.

After a bit more raking around I found an old SCSI1 drive box, which at one stage I used to have two CD ROMs and 4 SCSI Hard drives installed onto it. After fitting an old SCSI1 CD-ROM into the box, and connecting it to the Netra then connecting the Console for which I used my Dell Laptop then finally applying power to everything, I booted the Laptop started Windows Hyper-term and was greeted by the Sun Netra forth interpreter prompt.

Page 2: Installing an Operating System