Restoring a Sun SPARCstation IPX part 1: PSU and NVRAM (2020)

https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/restoring-a-sun-sparcstation-ipx-part-1-psu-and-nvram

by ibobev • 5 months ago

109 58 5 months ago

God that machine was terrible - underpowered and undercooled, which led to frequent overheating and component failures. When I first started at Sun, they put one of those on my desk as a joke on my first day (it was quickly replaced so that I could get some real work done).

jeffbee2• 5 months ago

Yeah it was a real piece of junk, but I guess there's no accounting for nostalgia. People also like to restore the SGI Indy, easily the worst machine that SGI ever shipped.

At one point decades ago there were a lot of these IPXs and their SCSI accessories on eBay and they were a decent source of project boxes because you could use the power supply and stick your project where the hard drive was supposed to be, with the wires coming out the SCSI port. It looks like the model 411 is still $30 or so on eBay but there are few.

Keyframe• 5 months ago

Hey, don't trash talk Indy like that. It has.. well, it is Web! and has VRML.. and it's your only option for N64 devkit. So, there's that. Overall you're right though. Entry level machine. I have one in working order, rarely has use next to Indigo2 MAX impact. I do have one Sparc, haven't been booted in ages. I have to check whether it's IPX or Classic. I'm even afraid to boot it up.

JSR_FDED• 5 months ago

The Indy was awesome. One client had 400 of them, as long as you didn’t take the lowest RAM entry level model they were excellent. Hardware was reliable, graphical desktop better than MacOS today, and very low support burden.

bilegeek• 4 months ago

People also like to restore the SGI Indy

Because the Indy (and O2) are actually attainable. Indigo2, Octane2, Tezro cost 2-3x minimum. Sometimes a Personal IRIS comes up for relatively cheap though.

mzi• 5 months ago

At work in the 90s we gave tons of old Sparcstation 10s away. They rapidly replaced all IPX and IPS at the computer clubs around Sweden. One Volvo was destined for Luleå and was really weighted down with a trunk full of pizza boxes.

seanhunter• 5 months ago

Totally terrible. ONe place I worked we all had sparcs and the first thing that happened whenever anyone left is there would be this mad shuffle where everyone nicked everyone else's computer with the IPX being the prize for whoever wasn't there at the time or the new joiner. So I had the IPX for a while, even just using it as an x client for a remote build server it was horrible.

jjgreen• 5 months ago

But, but ... that cat

https://anachrocomputer.github.io/ipxcat1m.jpg

MengerSponge• 5 months ago

Classic day 1 hazing, the Wimp Lo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d696t3yALAY

foobiekr3• 5 months ago

I managed a lab of them. I _hated them_. They were unreliable, slow, and just absolutely miserable because they created endless complaints.

We were rolling out labs of Windows machines. Except for the lack of terminal, they were better on every single axis for the common university lab use cases - mostly netscape/mosaic and applications..

I also managed NeXT slabs and cubes; they were vastly better than the sun boxes because we had installed HDDs in the cubes and extra memory. The only problem with them was the absolutely terrible, shit behavior when users accidentally browsed the AFS root...

The only positive thing I can say about those Sun boxes is that _one_ behavior was better than NeXT. With NeXT, students would pull the power on them after wating four or five minutes of the beachball due to AFS I/O.

sixothree• 5 months ago

I remember a lab with diskless systems where your disk quota was smaller than the kernel panic dump. So basically if you crashed a machine your account was instantly filled up and basically nothing would work. I believe it affected mail as well. Fun times.

jeffbee2• 5 months ago

A younger person who only knows the comparative merits of Windows, macOS, and Linux in this decade probably cannot imagine the relief felt by people when they were finally able to move their technical applications off unix boxes onto Windows NT workstations. The situation was so bad, the computers cost so much and worked so poorly, a Dell with a Pentium Pro was like a miracle, at the time.

codejake2• 5 months ago

We still have a SPARC IPX in production, hosting an antiquated database. The hard drive sounds like grinding metal. I've been trying to get rid of it for years. I succeeded once, but it was brought back from the dead. This thing has been running with the original parts since 1993 to 2026, minus ~1 year of downtime.

Nobody has the root password anymore, but fortunately, it's vulnerable to at least seven remote root sunrpc exploits. We "log in" by running a Python script that pops a root shell.

No, I am not kidding.

Edit: Checked out records: purchased and brought online in 1993.

Edit 2: In response to "why don't you just change the password?". When I asked, I was told they "can't" because they'd "lose access to the database". I didn't ask them to elaborate, because it would have opened a whole new can of horror worms, but I removed it from the Internet (it's on a non-routable, weakly "air gapped" network now).

gknoy• 5 months ago

We "log in" by running a Python script that pops a root shell.

I'm surprised that when you do this, you can't then set the root password. (Also, holy cow. What a durable machine.)

TacticalCoder• 5 months ago

(Also, holy cow. What a durable machine.)

This. There was also a story and a video, about 10 years ago (?), of a Commodore 64 still used at a car shop in Poland to compute stuff related to tires/wheels settings (degrees/angles, something like that). The C64 had basically been used every day the shop was opened for 30 years. It could still be in use. Or maybe it got retired because the owner of the shop retired (and hence, in a way, outlived the mechanic).

jdboyd• 5 months ago

If you get a root shell once, why not change the root password then?

codejake2• 5 months ago

Great, obvious question!

The answer I got: "we can't. We'll lose access to the database". I did not ask for elaboration, but it is not routable to/from the Internet.

pkphilip• 4 months ago

Can't you just create another user with full privileges or at least setup another user with sudo privileges?

linksnapzz• 5 months ago

This box needs an official retirement ceremony when the database is migrated.

shrubble3• 5 months ago

QEMU has a SPARC CPU emulator; it might be possible to run the operating system and database in a VM on regular x86-64 hardware.

greatquux• 5 months ago

You absolutely can run 32bit Solaris in qemu SPARC emulation. 64bit is not there yet unfortunately. But definitely dd this and get it virtualized!

numpad0• 5 months ago

dump that disk asap!!!!!

ThrowawayR2• 5 months ago

Out of morbid curiosity, is there a recovery plan for when it inevitably experiences a hardware failure?

jeffrallen• 5 months ago

Buy parts from RS and fix it, silly.

jamesfinlayson• 5 months ago

I've been at two places with ancient physical hardware - in both cases there were people that just kept an eye on ebay and presumably payed whatever the asking price was for spare parts.

EvanAnderson• 5 months ago

A BlueSCSI[0] might be an interesting thing to add if you want to alleviate the hard disk sound.

[0] https://bluescsi.com/

alexhormozi• 5 months ago

oh yeah that's interesting

jrnichols• 5 months ago

This was a lot of fun to see, especially part 3 where it boots up. Us older guys (me, anyway) still find joy in seeing these old machines we learned our skills on being restored like this.

Thanks for posting this one. good find.

bradleyy• 5 months ago

Everybody hating on the IPX, but I have so much nostalgia. Yes, my friends who ran a repair shop kept employed fixing them, like transmission shops survive on minivan transmissions.

That era hardware (although I ended up with a fair bit of experience on the whole Sun 3/4 lines)... I had just gotten out of the Army, didn't know what I was going to be when I grew up, and the future was so terrifying but bright.

It's a good thing that I don't horde (except cars, that's a problem), because I'd have racks of these things. Named after Star Trek characters, not because I care about it, but because that was the naming convention at one of my first "real jobs".

IDK, maybe nobody else thinks this way, but I'm really glad to see someone fixing one.

pureagave2• 5 months ago

I had one on my desk and eventually a collection of Sparc 2, 10's and a V in my garage. I miss the keyboard and Sun OS 4, the Trinitron display and working on difficult engineering problems on those machines.

cesaref• 5 months ago

Nobody misses the terrible optical mouse with the blue metal mouse mat though! You are right, the keyboards were great.

ajross• 4 months ago

Everybody hating on the IPX

Most of that is misguided. The IPX was the high volume, low cost, face-for-the-user Solaris box during exactly the moment in the mid 90's where Intel and Microsoft took over and Sun and the Unix vendors lost the plot.

People remember it as a ridiculous $15k joke that was half the speed of the Pentium 100 you ordered out of the back of Computer Shopper.

But when the IPC and IPX were released, SPARC was still ascendant (Intel's flagship was the 486/33!), "PCs" were still running Windows 3.1 (or just DOS), Linux didn't exist yet, and they were the best computers you could get. Well unless you were a graphic nerd and tilted to SGI instead.

I very specifically remember salivating over these boxes, which were legitimate upgrades over the SPARCstation 1/1+/2 machines which were groundbreaking in the late 80's.

wolvoleo3• 4 months ago

I remember the java station 1 as well which was running byte code natively in an IPX-like box. That thing really was so horrendously slow out was basically a paperweight. I had the chance to play with one when it was just new but it was like a joke or something.

Maybe that gave the form factor a bad name because all their good stuff was in pizza boxes.

outofmyshed• 5 months ago

Not the greatest UNIX workstation in the world, but we had rooms full of them at my uni and I learned how to Internet on them. Still a lot of love for these.

pureagave2• 5 months ago

Great keyboard, great display, great OS. It was fast enough and a great terminal to bigger Sparcs if you needed it.

Doches• 5 months ago

Oh, man; I got my hands on a (dead) one of these when I was a freshman in college (2004) and instead of trying to restore it my friends and I gutted it and used it as an original Xbox case mod. It was pretty satisfying to show up at LAN parties with what looked like a Solaris box and watch people boggle when we played Halo on it...

Findecanor• 5 months ago

I've been wanting to get one for a PC mITX case mod. I love Sun's design language and the IPX cases are cute.

I have got a Sun Type 5 keyboard though. I brought it to a mechanical keyboard meetup once, only to show it off because it is so pretty. Not the best key feel though, but I've got nothing to use it with.

technothrasher• 5 months ago

I went through replacing the NVRAM on an old Sun 3/80 about a year ago. Amusing adventure, and then fun to get to use BOOTP again to network boot. Lots of nostalgia. Boy how I had forgotten how primitive it was to use SunOS 4.1.3.

epakai• 5 months ago

I got a IPX in 2022 and restored it. I was a bit lucky and mine was an ex-IBM unit that came with the Weitek SPARC POWER μP processor (80 MHz) upgrade.

It makes for a pretty good project box as one of the smaller SPARC machines. Lots of documentation from hobbyists, Sun's own service manuals, and OpenBSD/NetBSD. Flash SCSI disk replacements are much easier to get your hands on now (I used a ZuluSCSI).

I've kept a log with photos: https://drislock.org/pkb/machines/perfect.html#a-little-lunc...

It seems to have been part of IBM's IBM-IPT Tester system. Hostnames were interesting: flower, owl, piglet, diamond, hotlips. I didn't get any interesting data though since this system relied on network resources.

xenadu022• 5 months ago

Making the default MAC address and machine serial number depend entirely on the NVRAM/RTC battery is... a choice. You'd think they would have used some fusible links to burn the original values into the hardware to fall back on if the battery died.

rasz• 5 months ago

Nobody burns in MAC addresses. MAC is usually stored on eeprom. Either in BIOS or small i2c one on the NIC. Storing it in the nvram means you save $0.1 BOM, dont have to partition your bios chip and serialization becomes cheaper and faster. Its not like losing one is a problem, just bang a random number with Sun prefix and you will be statistically fine.

xenadu022• 4 months ago

Perhaps but is the machine serial number something customers should be able to trivially change? Or be something capable of being lost?

Joyfield• 4 months ago

I have one working (not the disk though) here at home.

Restoring a Sun SPARCstation IPX part 1: PSU and NVRAM (2020)

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