Date: Sat, 10 Sep 88 20:00:09 EST From: Dwight D. McKay (The Moderator) Reply-To: Suns-at-Home@mckay.UUCP Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V1 #24 To: Suns-at-Home-List Suns-at-Home Digest Sat, 10 Sep 88 Volume 1 : Issue 24 Today's Topics: Please add me to your list [sources via UUCP] Some questions... +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Submissions: suns-at-home \ @ea.ecn.purdue.edu | | Requests: suns-at-home-request > -- or -- | | Archives: suns-at-home-archives / ...rutgers!pur-ee!mckay!... | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Sep 2 09:56:06 1988 From: pur-ee!vax.cs.pittsburgh.edu!sir-alan!mikes Subject: Please add me to your list [sources via UUCP] To: Suns-at-Home-request@ea.ecn.purdue.edu Please add me to your mailing list; I do not yet have a SUN-at-home but hope to do so this year. Your readers not able to FTP sources might be interested in the comp.sources. unix/mod.sources/comp.sources.misc archive I operate on this system. The whole of all three newsgroups is available here for anonymous uucp; login of "pdsrc", no password; 814 333 6728 for 2400/1200 with autobaud or 814 337 0894 for Telebit TB+ cycling 2400-BREAK-9600-BREAK-1200. List of files in /usr/spool/pdsrc/all.subjects.Z; list of things in /usr/spool/ uucppublic in /usr/spool/uucppublic/my.directory. Michael L. Squires uucp: {necntc,cwjcc,hoptoad}!ncoast!peng!sir-alan!mikes Department of Political Science .!{pitt,uunet!convex}!sir-alan!mikes Allegheny College BITNET: mikes%sir-alan@pitt.UUCP (VAX) Meadville, PA 16335 MIKES AT SIR-ALAN!PITT.UUCP (IBM) Office: 814 724 3360 Internet: sir-alan!mikes@vax.cs.pittsburgh.edu Home: 814 337 5528 Data: 814 {333-6728,337-3159} login of "ubbs" for BBS ------------------------------ Date: Fri 9 Sep 88 16:39:37-PDT From: Bob Knight Subject: Some questions... To: suns-at-home@ea.ecn.purdue.edu Hi all - boy, am I glad Bill Croft turned me onto this list. Dwight - you're running quite an extremely valuable mailing list here. I've gone through all the old issues, and have gleaned some very useful information that arms me for the next stage of solar flares. I'm somewhat of a novice Sun hacker, but am learning loads by having my own machine to play with (as well as some time to do it...) I've got a 2/120 at home, with 4MB, Archive tape, ethernet, and Xylogics controller. My disks are two Fujitsu 2312s and a Fujitsu 2284 that I picked up from Los Alamos Sales for $225 (I couldn't believe it when it actually worked!). I have some system problems (more on that later), but things actually hold together. I'm currently running 3.2, and am contemplating buying 3.5. The price listed in the End-user guide is $550, discount category A. I have been quoted $475.75 by a local distributor (they get 27% from Sun, and are willing to "split the discount difference" with me.) This is the price with manuals --- seems worth it to me. The question is, do I win anything by going to 3.5 from 3.2? Are there better places to buy it from? There's been quite a bit of discussion on Sun-2 SCSI disks. Both Apex and Adcomp quoted $550 for a SCSI host adaptor, and it took them quite a while to figure out that such a thing actually exists (it's in the Sun spares catalog). I've seen $400 on the list. Was that price from them or Computer Horizons? Do any of you prognosticators see this price dropping any significant amount in the next 90-120 days? Mark Holm, in issue 17, states that one must have xy0 to boot a 2/120, because the boot prom doesn't support SCSI, and a 2/120 doesn't have eeprom. Is this absolutely the final word? Is it impossible to get a boot prom that knows about SCSIs? It sure would be nice to run all SCSI instead of SMD and SCSI, even if SCSI is slower --- not only is the 2/120 a heat generator, the Fuji's do their part, too! Now, for my disasters. I'm getting very intermittent parity errors, and don't know how to track them down. This is probably related more to the overhead involved in crossing window boundaries, but at least two of the errors have happened when I've done that. Can someone give me some pointers on debugging this sort of problem? Also, I suspect that the Fuji 2284 is doing something to the SMD chain (it's in the middle of the chain right now), since I'm getting write and read retries on some transfers --- memory address errors, mostly. No trashed filesystems, though --- I'm keeping a close eye, and keeping backed up, too. Doesn't seem to happen with the 2284 out of the chain. Can someone who knows more about SMD than I do shed light on that, too? I view the 2284 as a very interim thing, and will probably replace it as soon as finances allow. Finally, I'm interested in newer memory technology - replacing at least two of the four 1MB memory boards. I'll probably go to a 4MB board if I can swing it. I've been offered $120-150 per 1MB board in trade on a 4MB board that was $2200. Is this reasonable? Again, I suspect that 4MB boards are going to drop, especially since the DRAM shortage is easing. Any guesses on how quickly? Can one run more than 4MB on a 2/120? This is, of course, assuming that it's worth putting any money at all into memory for this machine, which is a decision I'm mulling. So, questions, questions, questions. I'd appreciate any correspondence or war stories. Bob Knight knight@csli.stanford.edu (this will soon be augmented by ...!unmvax!unm-la!estrella!bob) Knight and Associates Box 1473 Santa Fe, NM 87501 (505) 989-7641 ------- ------------------------------ End of Suns-at-Home Digest ******************************