title: unplanned obsolescence link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/unplanned-obsolescence/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 341 created: 2009/04/10 14:57:21 created_gmt: 2009/04/10 14:57:21 comment_status: open post_name: unplanned-obsolescence status: publish post_type: post

unplanned obsolescence

There was a time, before the dot-bomb bust, when Sun’s line of Sparc processors ruled the Internet, and many data centers.

Back then, the 220R box I’m working on now, with dual 450 MHz UltraSPARC-II processors, was a pretty decent machine. It could handle just about anything we threw at it.

No more.

After just finishing with an upgrade to perl 5.10.0 on this machine (it’s been running 5.6.1 for around 8 or 9 years), I’m in the process of painstakingly installing the various modules required by the suite of scripts that have built up around it.

Predictably, my involvement in doing this means that many of those modules will support our identity infrastructure. Like cryptography. Of course in the days since I last built those kinds of modules on this box, things in the crypto field have gotten somewhat more complex. Better crypto requires faster and more efficient processors. This is where the UltraSPARC-II may have met its match.

While building these same modules from scratch on my dual core Intel workstation at home did take time, that was nothing compared to what it’s taking on the 220R. While I’m getting the usual error messages, the build has slowed to a crawl as it goes through a keygen routine for Crypt::DSA. The running perl process alternately taking up around 49% on each CPU.

Looks like I’ll get to have a long lunch today.

And to think I could get one of these now over on eBay for only $125!

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