Fabian Schreyer <fabianschreyer%gmail.com@localhost> writes:
> what I am trying to do is to run a basic webserver on it. Of course it
> is just playing around, but I want to see if I can host a simple
> website on such an old machine in a secure manner.
Trying to do something with it for the sake of hardware retrocomputing
sounds fine. It's good that you understand that it's a challenge.
> I currently have 72 megs of RAM installed in this machine.
That's great to hear - I had a classic with 24 MB and it was really
difficult to do anything.
> Right now I hope I figure out how to cross compile stuff for this platform.
pkgsrc has limited support for cross compiling, which hasn't been
maintained in a while. Around 1999 there was quite a rampage to support
cross for sun2 and sun3 -- back then a sparc was a reasonable machine.
However, it more or less depends on the upstrem programs supporting
cross builds, and there are no recent reports of it being really
successful. Still, looking at this is not crazy.
There are two other things to think about: distcc and qemu.
Note that if e.g. on a big amd64 box you do a full sparc build, you'll
end up with a full set of cross tools, and a cross destdir that you can
point -I to. So you can build distcc on the sparc, and on the big box,
and arrange for it to use the cross tools, and use
PKGSRC_COMPILER=distcc gcc, so that the actual compliation is cross on
the big box, but the rest of the build is native. That really should
just work, modulo hiccups in getting it set up. And gcc is slow and
memory hungry, compared to many things, so it's a big win.
The other thing you can do is run NetBSD/sparc in qemu on a big box,
where you can give it 2G of RAM. It is probably some factor (2x? 4x?)
slower, but 4x slower than a 3 GHz modern CPU is probably still way
faster than your classic.