I've got an old Sun Blade 100 workstation that I've been using as a web and application server and file store since I bought it in 2000. At the time, it was the biggest (1.6GB RAM) and just about fastest (500MHz RISC CPU) machine in the joint. Today, I've got bigger and faster virtual machines running on one of my workstations. Sigh.

Nonetheless, I did have a ton of old data on it, that now seems to be inaccessible.

A few months ago I started migrating data and services off of the old Blade onto a newer, faster, bigger Intel-based server running Ubuntu. I started with a version of OpenSolaris, but in the swirl that surrounded the Oracle/Sun merger, I thought it might be the case that OpenSolaris would go the way of so many merger casualties. It seems I was right to be hesitant, as they're moving to a model where the good fixes will require a support contract or lengthy delay. Also, it took only a few minutes to configure the Ubuntu server, and I suspected the effort would only be temporary. Of course, it hasn't been.

One of the first things I off-loaded was the database server. It's long been the case that I've been using GMail to archive the databases (dump, encrypt, e-mail to "myself"), so even if I hadn't done this, I'd have some recent data anyway. Offloading the database server allowed the Sparc a little breathing room as the processing and other resources used by the database server would be offloaded. It had been my original plan to simply use the new server as a database and e-mail server only, but that quickly faded.

I host a small number of websites on the servers, and as new ones were being put together, I put them on the new server. Since it was faster, and I was in there, I started migrating the sites from the Sparc as well. I did other peoples' sites first, and some of my more trivial ones, too. There aren't a lot, mind you, and had I set out to do it, I probably could have moved the twenty-ish sites in a couple hours. I did it more slowly, ensuring that the sites finished passing through DNS propagation before moving on to the next one or small number.

Eventually, I got all of the other people's sites moved, and had only one or two of my more complex, stubborn, or out-of-date sites remaining. All that remained was really these few websites and my 10-year old data repository.

Around this same time, I started tinkering with an old project, and so I threw together a portable drive filled with the collections of my various "home" directories from the ages of recent every-day machines. I distracted myself with an effort to toss the garbage and combine the common stuff, and order the historic stuff. In particular to the Sparc, I copied my whole data repository to the portable drive as that contained an essential baseline for the effort.

Shortly after I got into this, the Sparc started giving me a little grief. In the 10 years prior, the only time the machine had turned off or rebooted without my direction was due to a power failure that exceeded its UPS. But it became the case that the server would reboot on its own, or panic and sit waiting for attention, providing no services at all. The rebooting was just annoying as I have service monitors configured on my servers to alert me when they can't see each other, so when the system would reboot I'd get a flurry of "server down" followed by "server up" messages. When it would panic, I'd only get the "server down" messages. I knew it was time to focus on trying to get the rest of the stuff off of the server before something bad happened.

I did manage to pull almost everything off. I got two of the last three big sites moved to the new server, and the third copied to the aforementioned portable drive. I took a sigh of relief. Then accidentally deleted the copy on the portable drive. Not just of that folder, but of the whole /home folder on the server. I started trying to copy it again, but started running into system-seizing panics.

I'd shutdown the system overnight, and when I had some time, fire it up and as quickly as possible copy small sets of directories until it would panic. During this process I noticed that one of the drives was giving the dreaded "click of death." It had to be the original primary drive, not the secondary larger data drive I'd added a few years after getting the box; the primary drive mounted / while the other just mounted /export, also the fstab configuration for the primary would panic on failure while the secondary should just unmount. There's no way to make it not panic when / gets lost.

I tried booting from a CD, but couldn't mount the drives with the installer--there aren't any LiveCDs for Sparc, just install disks, and I can't get the couple I tried to mount the drives so I could copy the stuff off to another system. Sigh again. I even went so far as to try to set up a network boot server to get the system to boot totally in memory. All I want is a network connection and mount points for the drives so I could scp things away! Alas, in the end I decided the next step would be to pull the drives and see if I could mount them in another machine. I've got some USB adapters, but I'm not sure how they'd handle the Solaris partitions.

That decision was the last straw in determining the system's final outcome, it seems. When pulling the cable from the hard drive, one of the pins pulled free from the drive and flew away from the cable that pulled it out. I cringed, did a quick Google to find the IDE pin-out (2000, remember?). Sure enough, not one of the "not used," but instead "DATA0" giving me a critical blow, silencing the drive forever.

I shrugged, knowing I can't coax the electrons to just see each other on the end of that few millimeter gap. I'm not sure if that's like jumping across the Grand Canyon, to the Moon, Jupiter, or Alpha Centauri for an electron. Doesn't really matter...unless it's destructive, it's not gonna jump the gap.

Now I've gotta find one of my stronger-skilled solder buddies and see if I can sweet talk 'em into soldering on that broken pin. The data's worth that much effort, but not much more.

I've made due and replaced the missing bits from the data, and accepted that the rest is lost. Unless someone with mad solder skills and some USB or other mounting luck works out.

Now I've got an otherwise just fine Sun Blade 100 sitting around, idle for the first time in 10 years. I feel a little bad for it. It's only got a few dings against it. It's got a small address space in its version of a BIOS, limiting it to 80GB or smaller drives. It came with a 20GB drive, and, of course, is meant to utilize network storage. I've got a couple of IDE-to-CF adapters laying about, and I'm thinking of picking up an 8-16GB compact flash to use as the boot hard drive. The basic OpenSolaris install only takes 3GB. It'd suck to put swap space on a CF, but really the box has never used its 1.6GB, so I can probably get away with it, and I think I can mount /tmp in RAM. Or I can break down and buy an over-priced small drive.

I'm sad my little Sparc is gone.