Byebye Sun Blade

I still have a lot of old Sun systems at home.

• An ULTRA 10
• An UTRA 5
• A Sun Blade 100 (see down below)
  
• ... and some other stuff

Lazy as I am, I had the Sun Blade configured as my media server, running MediaTomb. I know, I know, it sounds awkward, and that's exactly what it is. Not only does it consume way to much power to be running all day, but even the simplest thing is getting hard when you are running Ubuntu on SPARC on what is not Sun's best system ever.

So, I bought the NSLU2 the other day, and figured that - if I would replace its firmware - it would be capable of doing everything I wanted my home server to do. That all worked out quite nice, but while I was at it, I also decided to upgrade the Blade 100 to Unbuntu Feisty. Now, that didn't work out all that well. I couldn't reboot it, no matter what I tried.

Unfortunately, the MP3 collection still resided on the built-in hard disk. Auch. I was no longer able to access that, and I didn't really feel like going through the pain of ripping our CD collection again.

So after trying at least four different Live CD distributions, I finally succeeded reconnecting the old home directory by booting with the System Rescue CD. I am currently rsyncing the data, and everything seems to be fine.

So what did I learn of this excercise?

• I solemnly declare never to upgrade a system without making a backup first.
• I solemnly declare to have backups of the MP3 collection all over the place.
• I solemnly declare not to ever touch OpenSolaris based distro's ever again.

Regarding the last point. It just seems that - even though the OpenSolaris based distros for SPARC are booting ok on Blade 100 - they don't come with any tools at all to recover ext3 partitions. In fact, having used Linux mostly, trying to use OpenSolaris tools seems like black magic anyway. You are just much better of using Linux, and the System Rescue CD referenced before is a nice option. The SPARC distribution works fine on a Blade 100.

I'm tempted to add another new year's solution: never ever to run Linux on old SPARC hardware again. I'll think about that. The consequence would be that I basically don't have a real server back at home any longer. On the plus side: it would clear out a lot of space on the attic. I'm sure my wife would love it. (The old servers are in a small cabinet. The new NSLU2 based setup fits in a small shoebox.)

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