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Comment by dmd | Hacker News Reader

27 years ago my job was hosting hundreds of websites (CBS News, among them) on Sun hardware just like that. It baffles me that anyone would consider this a question at all.

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Agreed. The Netscape IPO was over 30 years ago. What do people think the web was running on back then?

And why do you think that machine is called a Netra?

> And why do you think that machine is called a Netra?

Netras were designed for telco use so not for any obvious reason as you suggest. It was available with -48V power supplies.

Were those websites supporting SSL connections, much less TLS 1.2? That would be my question on hardware that old. (In this case, it looks like they offload TLS to Cloudflare, so the machine itself isn't doing any encryption/decryption.)

He offloads TLS to the Proxmox server within their home network. TLS is used between that server and Cloudflare to keep everything safe during transport.

Recent OpenBSD should be able to do modern TLS, and probably ACME, which would have been more interesting.

The question is more about the hardware. Back then, TLS existed but was used sparingly for things like banking, because of the computational overhead, at both the server and client end. Today's computers are so much faster that we don't even think about it.

AES-GCM would be very slow on such an old computer, without hardware instructions for AES and for CLMUL.

However, this is precisely the reason why TLS also has the option to use ChaCha20-Poly1305, which will have a decent speed even on an ancient SPARC CPU, though on the most recent CPUs it cannot match the throughput of AES-GCM, which is preferred on these.

So if you want to use a SPARC with TLS 1.3, you must configure it to avoid AES-GCM and use only ChaCha20-Poly1305.

Yes, already back most people would not be putting their credit card details just like that.

Typically, fun memory they'd move to a secure connection for credit card input, but most of the site would be open HTTP - why secure what isn't confidential? Concerns about 3rd parties eavesdropping on the sites you visited weren't a big thing at the turn of the century.

> It baffles me that anyone would consider this a question at all.

Thank you for saying this. I read this article a few days ago and felt the same: it's a 64-bit gigahertz-class RISC purporse designed internet server with a gig of RAM, running a current OS released less than 4 months ago.

OF COURSE it can host a website. A hundred active ones at once, I should think.

Same here, I was more of a big iron UNIX guy on those days, the Linux server we had at the office was for hosting MP3 files and as Quake server for the occasional LAN parties.

Aix, HP-UX and Solaris, alongside Windows NT/2000 were our production server operating systems.

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