Looking for Sun computer hardware

[Forest]

And so he did. Thanks heaps Pete! Installed a CD-ROM into it. But the bloody monitor won't sync to the Sun.

Now I have to try and prise my son's SGI monitor off him so I can boot it up.

There's two potential problems you're seeing.

The first is that the sparcstation uses sync-on-green video. Most PC monitors use sync-on-composite (though strangely enough, even the cheapest modern LCD screens also support SOG these days). So you'll need to use a monitor that supports SOG.

The second potential problem is that the CG6 card used in in SS5 has a native video mode of 1152x900 @ 76HZ. A lot of older monitors don't support this mode.

Your best bet is to attach a serial console to the SS5 and go from there. Nextstep has a X-windows client, so you don't actually need a local graphical console.

[Bonez]

http://www.trademe.co.nz/Browse/Sear...omSuggest=true

[riffer]

Most PC monitors use sync-on-composite (though strangely enough, even the cheapest modern LCD screens also support SOG these days). So you'll need to use a monitor that supports SOG.

Spot on there mate. I've thrown a cheapo old 15" Philips LCD onto it - works perfectly.

Seems to be running Solaris 9 - says SunOS 5.9 at startup. I've thrown an old Toshiba CDRom onto it.

I've tried to start it and it comes searching for a domain server to log - no matter, I'm going to throw a new OS onto it anyway.

I was going to mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 as /a so I could edit the password using vi but its giving me errors. Not sure why?

And of course the bastard won't boot off the CDRom. I've done a probe-scsi-all where it shows me its seen the SCSI devices. Target 3 is of course the hard drive and target 5 is the CDRom.

and then I tried to boot off the CD and it repeats my command with a "?" after it. Bastard.

I know the earlier Sun's used a weird type of CD drive with 512 byte blocks. I wonder if I've used a CD drive with the standard 2 kb blocks, but I'm sure this didn't affect the sparcstations.

Anyone know what the command in Openboot is to check this? There don't seem to be anything under test-all to say the CDRom is a problem...

possibly set-env boot-device cdrom might be the answer. Must test that once the kids have gone to bed.

Openboot seems cool though.

[Forest]

Spot on there mate. I've thrown a cheapo old 15" Philips LCD onto it - works perfectly.

Seems to be running Solaris 9 - says SunOS 5.9 at startup. I've thrown an old Toshiba CDRom onto it.

I've tried to start it and it comes searching for a domain server to log - no matter, I'm going to throw a new OS onto it anyway.

I was going to mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 as /a so I could edit the password using vi but its giving me errors. Not sure why?

And of course the bastard won't boot off the CDRom. I've done a probe-scsi-all where it shows me its seen the SCSI devices. Target 3 is of course the hard drive and target 5 is the CDRom.

and then I tried to boot off the CD and it repeats my command with a "?" after it. Bastard.

I know the earlier Sun's used a weird type of CD drive with 512 byte blocks. I wonder if I've used a CD drive with the standard 2 kb blocks, but I'm sure this didn't affect the sparcstations.

Anyone know what the command in Openboot is to check this? There don't seem to be anything under test-all to say the CDRom is a problem...

possibly set-env boot-device cdrom might be the answer. Must test that once the kids have gone to bed.

Openboot seems cool though.

The "boot-device" flag is only used when the "auto-boot?" flag is enabled, or if you want to use the "boot" command in the OBP.

The problem is likely that the device alias "cdrom" doesn't point to the CD-ROM drive that you installed.

Run the "devalias" command and check that the device path for the CDROM alias is correct. You can get the list of device paths by using the "show-devs" command at the OBP.

The issue you mentioned with the 512B blocks is real (you need to be able to read 512B blocks to boot from CD on any Sun system). However most SCSI CD-ROM drives should work ok. There may be a jumper on the back of the drive that switches between 512B and 2KB blocks.

[riffer]

http://www.trademe.co.nz/Browse/Sear...omSuggest=true

Shame on you Bonez.

PAY for old computers?

All my old gear seems to fall in my lap

or I pick it up at $1 reserve auctions on TM.

besides, I've already got a sparcstation 4, and that server model is headless.

My sparcstation 5 has the following specs:

170mhz Toshiba Ultrasparc
96MB ram
2gb hard drive
32X CDRom
S24 frame buffer
SunOs 5.9

[Bonez]

Shame on you Bonez.

PAY for old computers?

All my old gear seems to fall in my lap

or I pick it up at $1 reserve auctions on TM.

besides, I've already got a sparcstation 4, and that server model is headless.

My sparcstation 5 has the following specs:

170mhz Toshiba Ultrasparc
96MB ram
2gb hard drive
32X CDRom
S24 frame buffer
SunOs 5.9

I hear ya. I appreciate cast offs as well. Its a pity those ones on TM didn't have power cables.

I just stick to generic stuff mainly. You know 486, 64megs of ram, 2 gig hdd, Linux.
http://s272.photobucket.com/albums/j...t=Mandrake.gif

Collect old x86 OSs(Dos/win/NT,os/2 etc in packaging with manuals) and software mainly, though.

Remember seeing a Sparc workstation at the tech drawing office at Ohakea and thought wow! Was doing DTP using Interleaf at the time served off a Sun server to my workstation, which was a colour Mac. Compaq 286s with Dos and WordStar were used for large amounts of text.

[riffer]

probe-scsi says:

/iommu@0,10000000/sbus@0,100010000/espdma@5,8400000/esp@5,8800000

target 3
Unit 0 Disk IBM DORS32160SUN2.1GWA7A97056C6967

Target 5
Unit 0 Removable Read Only Device TOSHIBA CD-ROM XM-6201TA103011/14/97

devalias says:

disk /iommu/sbus/espdma@5,8400000/eps@5,8800000/sd@3,0

cdrom /iommu/sbus/espdma@5,8400000/eps@5,8800000/sd@6,0:d

so my understanding here is that we should have a common scsi bus here, with the drive ID at 3, and the CD at 6. The XM6201TA is a commonly used CDrom for Suns, so I reckon it should be okay.

I tried boot /iommu/sbus/espdma@5,8400000/eps@5,8800000/sd@6,0:d

with the result Can't open boot device, so it definitely sounds like my alias is wrong, but:

a) It looks (based on the target number) that the SCSI disk is set to five, and
b) I'm not sure how to change it in OpenBoot.

I'm going to check the CDROM and see if I can change the ID to 6 (which I bloody well thought it was) and see if it makes a difference.

Any other ideas? Do I have the wrong end of the stick and the taget number is putting me wrong?

[riffer]

Well,, whaddaya know.

Should have checked the bloody ID.

Has ID=6 written in felt pen on the drive.

Has the jumpers for ID=1 and ID=4 set on it, instead of ID=2, ID=4.

Damn.

Oh well. All good now...

[Forest]

Sounds like you've got it sorted.

probe-scsi and probe-scsi-all will always give you the SCSI ID that each device has been set to.

You can't change the SCSI ID from the OBP. It has to be set using the jumper block on the drive.

If you wanted to leave the CD-ROM set to SCSI ID 5, then you could do

boot /iommu/sbus/espdma@5,8400000/eps@5,8800000/sd@5,0:d

Or you could have changed the CDROM device alias with

devalias cdrom boot /iommu/sbus/espdma@5,8400000/eps@5,8800000/sd@5,0:d

So you could do: boot cdrom

As an aside, booting off the CDROM will launch the Solaris installer.

If you want to reset the existing password, you need to boot into single use mode. You can do this with the -s flag. In other words:

boot cdrom -s

This will drop you into a single user root shell. You can then mount the disk and edit the /etc/shadow file in vi to remove the old root password hash.

[riffer]

Sounds like you've got it sorted.

probe-scsi and probe-scsi-all will always give you the SCSI ID that each device has been set to.

You can't change the SCSI ID from the OBP. It has to be set using the jumper block on the drive.

If you wanted to leave the CD-ROM set to SCSI ID 5, then you could do

boot /iommu/sbus/espdma@5,8400000/eps@5,8800000/sd@5,0:d

Or you could have changed the CDROM device alias with

devalias cdrom boot /iommu/sbus/espdma@5,8400000/eps@5,8800000/sd@5,0:d

So you could do: boot cdrom

As an aside, booting off the CDROM will launch the Solaris installer.

If you want to reset the existing password, you need to boot into single use mode. You can do this with the -s flag. In other words:

boot cdrom -s

This will drop you into a single user root shell. You can then mount the disk and edit the /etc/shadow file in vi to remove the old root password hash.

Yeah, I'd already done that. But the silly thing seems to be set up as a brainless X-windows client running off an LDAP server, so I'm reinstalling the OS.

Besides, I've thrown a bigger hard drive into it, so all going well it will be a complete runner tonight now I've found a Solaris install.

Another thing - I'm getting a carrier not found error on LE0 - which is off because the lights are glowing on the back on the box and on my 100MB switch.

Is this because LE0 is 10-base-T and the sparc doesn't play with 100mbit switches?

I might throw a 10MBit hub inbetween them to test that theory too...

You know its amazing how similar these sparcs are to macs - I've had a bit of experience with the macs which run heavily modified Nextstep system with a neat GUI on top of Darwin/BSD (MacOSX for you dummies) - especially how similar OpenBoot is to OpenFirmware.

[Forest]

Well spotted. Openboot and openfirmware are in fact the same thing.

With regards to the le0. Check the status of the "tpe-link-test?" flag in the OBP. It defaults to true, but if your switch doesn't do a link integrity switch, then you'll get the no carrier error.

Best to get rid of the current OS image. Solaris 7 was the last version officially supported on the Sun4m machines, but you can get get 8 & 9 going with a bit of hacking (to bypass the installer scripts).

[riffer]

With regards to the le0. Check the status of the "tpe-link-test?" flag in the OBP. It defaults to true, but if your switch doesn't do a link integrity switch, then you'll get the no carrier error.

Hmmm.

Solaris 8 2/04 install easily on the sparc so maybe it is supported.

as for the ethernet still no go. Perhaps I need a dedicated 10mbit switch.

I tried tpe-link-test in OBP. It came back tpe-link-test ? so maybe my syntax is wrong - I'll consult a forth manual - I've downloaded one so will report back.

As for Solaris 8 and CDE it seems to run absolutely fine on a 170mhz sparcstation 5 with 96mb of RAM so I'm pretty stoked. Once I get this etherne problem licked it'll be perfect.

[Forest]

Hmmm.

Solaris 8 2/04 install easily on the sparc so maybe it is supported.

as for the ethernet still no go. Perhaps I need a dedicated 10mbit switch.

Sorry. Brain fart. You should be good for anything up to Sol9.

I tried tpe-link-test in OBP. It came back tpe-link-test ? so maybe my syntax is wrong - I'll consult a forth manual - I've downloaded one so will report back.

As for Solaris 8 and CDE it seems to run absolutely fine on a 170mhz sparcstation 5 with 96mb of RAM so I'm pretty stoked. Once I get this etherne problem licked it'll be perfect.

The "tpe-link-test?" is just an OBP flag (or environment variable).

Type "printenv tpe-link-test?" to see what it has been set to (it is set to true by default).

Type "setenv tpe-link-test? false" to turn off the link integrity test.

[riffer]

The "tpe-link-test?" is just an OBP flag (or environment variable).

Type "printenv tpe-link-test?" to see what it has been set to (it is set to true by default).

Type "setenv tpe-link-test? false" to turn off the link integrity test.

Okay, I've checked that. tpe-link-test was set to true. I've set it to false.

It's still coming up with that same error.

*sigh*

[Forest]

Bugger.

Any chance that the NVRAM battery has died? The NVRAM holds the MAC address for the ethernet adapter, so it won't work if the battery dies.