Sun Blade 2000 usage/observations
So, my trusty SB 100 (which I moded with a SB 150 cpu, 2gb ram, fast ide drives) was no longer cutting it for what I needed to do (some tasks were cpu bound, some where io bound). I did not have the spare funds to buy a new Sun box, but it turns out that used SB 2000 boxes are running slightly under a grand (mine even came with a year of warranty). It has two 1.015 UIII procs, 2 gigs ram, 1 36gb FC hard drive. I thought that my observations may be helpful to others, and I am not quite sure where else to put them.
1) I have installed both Sol 10 GA, with recommend patch cluster (or at least the current one I had) and Sol Express 5/06 (I guess the basis for what will be Sol 11). I noticed immediately that Sol Express seems to work better with my keyboard/kvm. I have a Belkin KVM switch, with PS/2. I use a KVM adapter to change from PS/2 to usb, and in Sol 10 GA, the pipe key (|) does not work. Suffice it to say, this is extremely annoying if you need to script/use shells/whatever. I can get around it by logging in remotely, but that is not a great solution. Sol Express works fine.
2) 2) No matter what I did, I could not get my dvd-rom to boot the DVD image (iso). I tried both the download Sol 10 iso and the Sol express iso, and neither would boot. It booted the CD image isos just fine. I tried various write speeds�no luck. I did not have another scsi dvd rom, so I could not try another drive to see if it is really the drive or the system. I do know that I could boot a DVD image for sparc linux (though not much more than that, as described below).
3) So, I am a person that uses their machines to the most possible, and I read from various places about many people dual booting their sparc machines. I tried old and new versions of every sparc linux distro I could find (debian, aurora, gentoo). 2.4 and 2.6 kernels alike, I usually got to a part of the SILO boot that allow me to press enter or type linux/gentoo/whatever. At that point, I get an MMU Miss error. Every time on every distro. I read about this, and some people suggest they download their OBP. I did that. I went through at least 9 versions (not sure what that does to my flash prom, but no go. Some gave a slightly different error, but all referred to MMU Miss. I went all the way down to 4.5.(4?)�which was release in early 2002. Still no go. Some people have reported their works, so I am assuming that something change with the cache/cpus (mine are 1.015, and there were some revisions before that like the 900s, and also I think mine are copper . . . not sure why this would make a difference). One person wrote he thinks it is a problem upstream with SILO, and that it is up to that maintainer to get it to work. If anyone has gotten it to work on a box with these specs, let me know. I have not pulled out any memory nor removed one of the processors, though I might later just to see if it makes a difference. I know I could get a couple of versions to boot on my SB100, but that is neither here nor there since it is a pretty different architecture.
4) I threw in a second Expert 3d-lite PCI card (it came with one) to enable screen spanning/TwinView/whatever you want to called it. Struggled a bit with xinerama, but the following line works:
:0 Local local_uid@console root /usr/openwin/bin/Xsun +xinerama -dev /dev/fbs/ifb0 -dev /dev/fbs/ifb1 defdepth 24 defclass PseudoColor
Actually, the dcmtool (display configuration management, I guess) that you can download from Sun really helps. It set up my monitors just fine (twin Dell 20 inch flat lcds, that can do 1600x1200x60), with one exception: I could not get dcm to switch them to 1600x1200x60. They remained at 1280x1024x60 every time, even though it looked like the changes were save. Manually changing them via fbconfig �dev /dev/fb1(2) �res 1600x1200x60 did the trick.
5) I have an external usb dvd-writer that I planned to connect. Every time I did this, though, the machine core dumped. Indeed if I left it connected/powered on, it went into a continuous cycle of core dumping before the system could get part way through boot (even before hostname comes up, I think). When I removed the connection, it works fine. By the way, I have only tried this on Sol Express, not Sol 10 GA. I have read that these ports are only USB 1.1, and that not all devices are supported. I do know that I will be trying to put in a USB 2.0 PCI card (Sun has a list of some that should work�I have one with an NEC chipset that I hope will work). Will keep you posted. I do not think I have every come across a scsi dvd burner, and firewire devices seem to be even less supported than usb, so this would be my most likely workable option.
6) Like a couple of you, I would like to be able to cheaply expand the storage (36gb FC is good for boot in terms of speed and space, but I have an aweful lot of . . . (legal status unknown) media files. I figure my best bet would be to start with Sol Express here, and try to get something to work (not afraid of diving into kernel configs/even a little driver writing), but I know a some of the new UIIIi boxes come with SATA. That means that there is a chipset/drivers out there that work, and maybe there are some relatively cheap cards that can be gotten to work. The one card that I have run across that the company claims certainly does work is:
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=132717&prodlist=pricegrabber
I will have to look closely at what chipset LSI uses, but $230 is not bad at all for an enterprise-quality card (compare it to the range of SUN/IBM/HP offerings for some of their workstations/servers). But I know a $50 SATA card would work equally well for my purposes (just a couple of connections, no raid really), so I will try to get something cheaper to work. Again, if anyone knows anything . . .
7) I cannot live without MythTV. Really, it is just great (when it works). SageTV and others I am sure work well, but I know most about MythTV. But when I asked one of the developers about a solaris sparc port, he laughed. So it maybe this is to be my next opensource project. Actually, if anyone knows of any solution for tuner cards/drives on solaris (preferably sparc), please let me know. I have not been able to find any.
8) The usability and quietness of the machine are something I would like to finish up with. I was not expected crazy performance (I research enough to know that this is basically last generation technology, and Sun has been losing at lot of certain performance battles for some time). Openssl speed show me some stuff, some of the apps I run showed me others. This is not a speed demon, but it is a whole hell of a lot better than a SB100. I can actually run a lot of the code I run for clients and have it perform better (a lot of them run it on Sun Fire 240s and the like). Very little thrashing occurs (work quite a bit on Linux, and the memory subsystems can be very different; you have to understand the advantages/disadvantages) yet. It is big�I mean I knew the proportions, and the UPS package was 77 lbs. It is big; deeper than I saw in my minds eye. I have a shelf I put my workstations on, but this does not fit on it.  I have a Dell 530 dual cpu xeon workstation right next to it (with internal scsi 10,000 rpm drives). The Dell is definitely faster for certain things, and louder (actually, I think that is true, but more importantly the fans seem to spin at a higher frequency, so it is definitely more noticeably than the lower pitch of the fans of the SB 2000). I have both running seti right now, and they can both be easily heard�but I prefer the sound of the SB 2000. Not sure which one gets hotter/puts out more heat, but I know the room I am in is a good 10 degrees warmer than the rest of the house.