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Hardware

Experiences with the Sun Blade 100? 21

Posted by Cliff from the how-well-has-it-worked-for-you dept.
SomewhereElse asks: " It's been a few months since Sun introduced the Sun Blade 100 and I wanted to ask Slashdot readers who have had the oppotrunity to review/play with the box what they thought of it. How upgradeable is it? How fast does it feel? And were there any problems with the hardware?"
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Experiences with the Sun Blade 100? More

Experiences with the Sun Blade 100?

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  • Mine is awful. Absolutely hideous. I suspect that it's a problem with configuration, but I haven't had time to reinstall to fnid out. Basically, it's too slow to be useful. When I telnet or ssh into the box, it'll do nothing for perhaps 15 to 20 seconds, then I'll hear the disk spin up, and I'll get in. Once the machine has woken up, it performs quite reasonably (although network performance is still extremely slow). The symptoms lead me to think it's a power management issue, but I haven't changed anything from the standard configuration. The machine is basically as it came from Sun. Maybe a reinstall will fix things, but until our dealines are out of the way, I just don't have time...
  • That problem smells very much like your machine is waiting for a DNS lookup to complete before accepting the connection. See if your machine can reverse-lookup the machine you're telnet'ing/ssh'ing from.

    The machine might be doing DNS lookups to match IP wrappers settings or just for logging purposes. Sometimes if the machine has no reverse-DNS name (e.g. common on a private home lan segment), it'll just sit there twiddling its thumbs for a long time trying to figure out of any other DNS servers in the world can figure out the name. :-)

  • Ok, as people pointed out, IDE performance is complete and utter CRAP, so any disk IO is s-l-o-w. I suppose you can stick a SCSI card in it.

    The other problem I had with them. Hmm. We got several of them at work, and this one guy's 'blade dies one day. I open it up and the CPU heatsink wasn't actually CONNECTED to the CPU. So the CPU fried. After they replaced the the CPU the IDE chain died. Took SUN a week to figure out that what I told them was correct.

    Other than that they're a fun machine. I wish the SUN logo was translucent and had a blue LED behind it. I might have to do that to this box (:


    --
  • (haven't tried Linux on it, no reason to)

    I tried it. My reason was Because It's There. I tried Red Hat, debian and SuSE, none of them could even boot.

    I Emailed one of the Debian/SPARC developers and offered my help, and got a slightly impolite "Why don't you sit down, shut up and wait for us to do it, eh?"


    --
  • It's silent until the CDROM starts dying (:

    The one advantage a 'Blade has over an Ultra5 is that it has a 24-bit graphics card by default. So if you're going to use a head on it, it's actually not as painful.


    --
  • Well, this is excellent, thanks.

    I figured it's a hacked kernel. In the meantime mine's actually running some solaris-only stuff, so I'll stick with it, but maybe I'll get another one for games.


    --
  • Just FYI --- Sun DOES make a "PC" style keyboard.
    When you order your Sun systems, ask for the "North American" keyboard kit -- it's no extra charge, and it includes the "proper" keys you're looking for.

    If you want to order the keyboard, its part number is:
    320-1271 Sun Type 6 USB keyboard (PC layout)
    320-1270 Sun Type 6 (proprietary connector) keyboard (PC layout)

    If you have a service contract (not warranty service!), these parts are covered if you should accidentially bust your keyboard.

    --DM
  • I just happened to be in the US on business the day the Blade hit the market. Overnight shipping to a friend's house, threw it into my bag and came back to Europe with it. Much jealousy ensued on this side of the pond. For about US$1500, I have a native sparc machine with 1Gb RAM and a 60Mb drive, and interactive performance rivals most of the bigger sun hardware at work (but as a server it is nowhere in the same league).

    The blade has now become my main home machine. Its basically a PC with a sparc in place of a pentium. You buy it to out-geek your geek friends, not to win childish MHz pissing games. It can be overclocked, and there are other hardware tweaks. The RAM is a cheap PC commodity, IDE drives easily upgradable (buy a matched pair, DiskSuite comes installed, and throw out that noisy seagate), the 10/100 ethernet provides excellent thru-put. You can use any USB keyboard or mouse you want, but mouse wheel support is still lacking. Standard VGA multisync monitors work with it.

    It runs all the hi-paying software that I and my conslutant friends use in our professional lives. Oracle 8i, SAP financials and tons of other stuff. Having a true sparc at home is great for brushing up over a weekend before heading out to a new client site, can't do that on an x86 box.

    There are some 'bad' things, but nothing to keep you from buying a blade. Support in OpenBoot for USB hubs is lacking, so you can't have a KVM switch or hub when booting (but you can switch once booted). There is a built in smartcard reader, but absolutely no software for it yet, it reads SunRay cards, but doesn't do anything. There is almost no USB driver support for all the cool USB peripherals out there (most USB crud requires special micro~1.oft or mac drivers to work, and solaris is ignored). There is no Firewire support, except for one hacked driver for their overpriced web-cam. There is only one serial port (the second one is on the mobo, just add your own cable). The built in sound card has no internal audio connector, so you can't play audio CDs in the internal drive, and you probably couldn't hear the music over the drive anyways, the CD-ROM is the loudest peripheral I've ever had, not counting disintegrating hard drives. The real time clock is so fucked, even ntpd can't correct it.

    With any luck, sun is working hard at fixing all the little problems. Most complaints come from lack of working features/drivers in Solaris, which means they'll get fixed in time. The hardware itself is pretty solid.

    Go read news:comp.sys.sun.hardware, and peruse google groups, and find the B100 FAQ and you'll have a much better idea of what to expect.

    the AC
  • So far so good. Yes, the IDE speed sucks, BUT, it is the drive and not the controller. Many people are putting in nice fast IBM drives and getting much better performance. The Seagate drive they ship is slow.

    Memory upgrades are easy. They ship Crucial memory in the unit so you know you're safe adding more. Nice to add 512MB of RAM to a Sun for $100. :)

    As someone else said, it is very quiet. Nice compared to my loud PC sitting beside it.
  • As someone already mentioned, it takes standard PC100 memory, and it COOKS! I've never had a problem with any of the hardware or the operating system, though I know not everyone is a Solaris afficiendo (haven't tried Linux on it, no reason to). One thing to note is that if you're planning on reinstalling it, make sure to use the 04/01 release of Solaris 8. There are disclaimers all over Sun's download page at http://www.sun.com/solaris [sun.com] as to why.

  • Finally, there is some crosstalk between the sound outputs and the video outputs leading to "buzzes" on certain screen backgrounds.

    According to the UnOfficial SunBlade 100 FAQ [wells.org.uk], people who have complained about this to Sun have gotten replacement motherboards that fix the problem [wells.org.uk].

  • I haven't tried it, but http://sunblade100.wells.org.uk/cgi-bin/bladefaq.c gi?file=60 [wells.org.uk] has instructions for installing SuSE 7.1 on a SB100, along with notes about which device drivers just aren't there yet (like the floppy drive).
  • All of my problems with it have to do with the
    onboard sound.

    As mentioned, there isn't an internal sound connection, so you can't easily route the cdroms
    sound around, short of putting a cable on the front cdrom "headphone" connection and routing it into line-in/microphone on the back.

    Also annoying is that you can't mute, or even adjust the volume of the "headphone" out.

    Finally, there is some crosstalk between the sound outputs and the video outputs leading to "buzzes" on certain screen backgrounds.

    Software-wise: I miss not having a lot of the more versatile gnu utilities pre-installed, but a quick visit to http://www.sunfreeware.com/ fixes that. And, to be fair, they have started shipping a lot more free software.
  • It is a solid machine, but not nearly as fast as a comparably priced x86 box. I looked at going the x86 Solaris route, but (1) the hardware options were limited and (2) perfomance was reputed to be awful, despite the higher processor speeds. The unit comes with a standard IDE drive that can be replaced with your choice of brand/size - no special Sun microcode on this thing. Also, the media kit ships with a bunch of goodies - development/trial versions of the various iPlanet(==Netscape) servers and Oracle 8i.

    Mike

  • I was looking to get one once I have the cash, but not yet. I like the idea of the Video Conf. system they have for it that runs on firewire but that is about an extra $250. As for upgradeability..... I know that you can get regular PC100 for RAM wich is dirt cheep compaired to Sun's prices. Look at Crutial.com or however you spell it for their Sun Blade RAM. Also from what I read in the specs online, it looks like it can only handel a pair 15 gig HD's which I would like to try to pass.
  • The RAM dealer web site is http://www.crucial.com/
  • The only problem with it is that IDE performance on Sun boxes continues to blow goats. The other annoying thing is that Sun flashes their own microcode describing disk geometry over the hard disks, making upgrading to a non-sun drive a pain in the ass.

    On the positive side, the Blade 100 is SILENT and machine overall is put together with excellent build quality.

    Other than that, the Blade is essentially the same as the Ultra-5 that it replaces.
  • That's funny

    I had the same thing happen to an Ultra 10, and the 'engineers' were just as clueless about it.
  • Many Symbios controllers work on Sun machines.

    Also, Sun makes a kickass SCSI/Ethernet combo that sells on ebay for around $200.
  • My school just bought a new sun blade 100 to replace an old SparcStation LX (yes, i know, it's ancient)that we were using as a computer science server. (It used to be a file server a number of years ago for a bunch of IPC workstations that have long since been taken out of commission) We just recieved it, and I like the upgradibility options compared to an Ultra 5 we just bought too, since in order to add a 2nd HD to the ultra, we had to remove the floppy, while with the blade we could keep the floppy. The little tray for the HD's pulled out easily, and the cables were just the right size and neatly labeled, keeping with Sun's standard practices. The only thing I notice however is that the CDROM is on the same channel as the primary HD... I'm assuming they assume that the CDROM won't be used much, or else that would slow the system down. If the CDROM is used sparsely, then it does make sense, since it will keep the HD's on seperate channels.

    Another nice feature I like is that the Blade comes with USB Keyboard and mouse, compared to the sun interface for keyboard/mouse for other systems. Now only if they could ship a keyboard that has a "normal" backspace key! (they still put the backquote where the normal backspace would go)

    The default Solaris configuration that comes with the system leaves much to be desired (especially partition-wise), so we're going to be formatting it and re-installing solaris from scratch with our own partition scheme. We ordered our Blade with 256mb of ram also (they normally ship with 128)

    Overall, it appears to be nice, although I haven't been able to use it for very long, so i can't make any substantial evaluations of it.
  • I got my Blade a couple of weeks after it came out, and I love it. 128MB of RAM isn't anywhere enough, but it's cheap to upgrade from Crucial. It's a welcome change from Linux, where it's a daily battle to get stuff compiled and working. Solaris is much better than Linux too, the directory structure is more logical, and of course, it's much more reliable. IDE performance is poor, but extra RAM will stop it accessing the swap so much, and make the situation a lot better. I bought it in the UK, so it was expensive, well, everything is expensive in the UK. Much more expensive than a similar speed PC/Mac, but that's not really the point is it? Sun's monitors, like thier RAM, are v expensive, but I'm a brand junkie, so I spent the extra for a proper SUN one. Many people will complain about the performance, but this is a RAM issue, 128MB on a SUN isn't even close to enough, consider 512MB a minimum. Conclusion: Great machine, brings SPARC to the masses, but add $100 for more RAM. It's nice to use a quality UNIX, rather than a flaky Linux distro.

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