Date: Fri, 24 Oct 97 20:48:26 EST From: Dwight McKay (The Moderator) Reply-To: Suns-at-Home@net-kitchen.com Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V10 #37 To: Suns-at-Home-List Suns-at-Home Digest Fri, 24 Oct 97 Volume 10 : Issue 37 Today's Topics: booting a 3/60 from DAT? disk formatting Look for an sbus card Problem booting Solbourne machine with error code. SunOS-4 vs. NetBSD Suns-at-Home Digest V10 #36 (2 msgs) Two heads are better than one (SS-I with two monitors) +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Submissions: suns-at-home \ | | Requests: suns-at-home-request > @net-kitchen.com | | Archives: suns-at-home-archives / | | WWW Archive access: http://www.net-kitchen.com/~sah | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 23 Oct 97 20:04:16 +0100 From: udo@dinges.xs4all.nl (Udo van den Heuvel) Subject: booting a 3/60 from DAT? To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com Hoi! Is it possible to boot a 3/60 from (scsi) DAT? If so: where could I obtain a bootable tape? (the hardware can do it, but is my software (ROM) OK?) Groeten, Udo --- GoldED/2 3.00.Alpha5+ -- | Standard disclaimer: These views are strictly my own. - ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 20:22:13 -0400 From: adh@an.bradford.ma.us (Sandwich Maker) Subject: disk formatting To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com, raub@kushana.aero.ufl.edu From: raub@kushana.aero.ufl.edu (Mauricio Tavares) How much is a cylinder in blocks? depends on your disk. [i said] > if you don't have it already, scsiinfo can interrogate any drive and > spit out a format.dat-style entry for it. get it. use it. love it. I must have an old copy of scsiinfo because mine won't give me that... unless I do not know how to ask it for that. =( as i recall, it's scsiinfo -f [device]. alas, i don't have a man page handy... :^< Andrew Hay +----------------------------------------------------+ Internet Rambler | JEEPS give me the WILLYS | adh@an.bradford.ma.us +----------------------------------------------------+ - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Oct 1997 08:49:10 -0400 From: Michael Thompson Subject: Look for an sbus card To: Mike Goumans >I am looking for an sbus card that will run idi drives. Ive picked up a >gaggle of those 1 gig seagate sabres out of an older mass storage array >and i wanted to hook 4 of them up to my ipx. I guess its just something >about running a disk subsystem thats multiple times larger than the >machine its hooked up to that makes me want to do it. If someone has one >around, id be willing to trade the spare scsi + 10base t sbus card i have >in the machine not hooked up to anything. I have several IPI disk controllers. Unfortunately they are all 9Ux400 full sized VMEbus boards. Considering the amount of circuitry on the board I would say that it would be impossible to make a S-Bus IPI controller for your IPX. I have two of these drives on my 4/470. >Last but not least, im interested in any wacky sun vme board. Basically if >its weird and you cant figure out what the heck you would want to do with >the card, I more than likely want it. How about a dual FDDI board? Video processors? Visualization processors? Michael Thompson E-Mail: M_Thompson@IDS.net - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Oct 1997 14:44:17 -0400 From: swegerm@baileys-emh5.army.mil (Michael Sweger) Subject: Problem booting Solbourne machine with error code. To: suns-at-home@tigger.net-kitchen.com Hello, I'm having trouble booting a Solbourne dual processor machine with 64Meg RAM each running Sunos4.1. This machine is slowly dying and we can't get any maintenance support for it anymore (went out of business). Here are the problems with it: - one of the processors died out of the two. The machine kept on working in spite of this but just lost a good 64M RAM allocated to this bad processor. It's been running ok for 2 years now. - the video card is slowly dying. At first the characters would have missing pixels, then garbage then the whole screen would have a black square hole on it where all the characters would rapidly disappear into before I could read them. The outside of this box was still white. Since this was usless I shutoff all output being sent to console when the Unix system boots. However, the computer would still boot. - Recently we had a power outage, and I had to do a reboot after 96 days running. During this time I was trying to shrink the system log files since they were pretty close to filling up the disk where /tmp is located. After varying the temperature in the room from 60-75F ( it previously liked 65F) to see if the temperature point had changed - made no difference - I removed and reseated the video card. Now it won't boot to the point where you are supposed to enter a boot tape (a flashing tape drive light). Note: it only got to this point if it couldn't boot correctly from disk. This either worked or didn't work depending on the room temp. Now, after reseating the video card I can't even boot the computer. The disks spin up and click (releasing the disk heads I assume) and trying to read the disk. However, at this point the disk drives lights go dark and I read an error code on the CPU LED with a self-test code of 18-45. My solbourne books don't mention what test this code represents so that I could determine if it is due to the reseat of the video card. Can anybody shed some light? My other question is, if the disk has filled up to 100% due to the sys logs recording boot up information, will this prevent me from booting my computer? I've never encountered this situation before so I don't know what would happen. I realize the /tmp directory is supposed to clear, but if the syslog files even ate up this available space then the bootup of the kernel may not have any disk space to work with in /tmp to finish booting up. TIA Mike Sweger swegerm@baileys-emh5.army.mil - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Oct 1997 18:50:06 -0400 (EDT) From: woods@most.weird.com (Greg A. Woods) Subject: SunOS-4 vs. NetBSD To: Ty Sarna > Date: Sun, 12 Oct 1997 16:53:09 -0500 (CDT) > From: Ty Sarna > Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V10 #35 > > Actually, when DMA, reselection, etc. are enabled, NetBSD/sun3 seems to > me to be slightly faster than SunOS. Trouble is, it also greatly > increases the occurances of running into the mystery sun3 pmap bug, so > things run faster, but die frequently (eg, named will die every few > days). It won't be any better in 1.3, because the pmap problem still > hasn't been found. Hmm... That's quite interesting. Back with NetBSD/sun3-1.2 I did a fair number of fairly scientific tests to see why my gut didn't feel so well about switching to NetBSD after I got it up and running. I had definitely enabled all the SCSI features and on identical hardware was getting abysmal numbers out of NetBSD. Posts to the NetBSD mailing lists at the time didn't entice anything of value though some folks suspected the oh-too-generic pmap code might be hampering things. I also ran a number of lmbench runs that forced me to conclude that context switching and other factors also adversely affected NetBSD. Overall I decided that losing ~25% of the performance of an already sluggish machine was too much to bear and so I've stayed with SunOS for now. Note that this was on a 3/260, so memory bandwidth may be a bit slower over the VME bus (I'm not sure what bandwidth 3/60's get out of their SIMMS, but it could be more than the VME bus can deliver which is probably quite a bit less than the theoretical maximum of 40MB/s). It didn't matter so much for my server but I also noted that X11R6 under NetBSD on a CG2 was a lot more sluggish than X11R5 under SunOS on a BW2. Of course it could have been any one of those three differences that accounted for it too.... There had been talk about rewriting the NetBSD/Sun3 pmap code but that seems to be still on hold (perhaps awaiting the supposed rewrite of all things VM that may be happening...). > None of this applies to NetBSD/sparc though, or even NetBSD/sun3x for > that matter. And I still find NetBSD to be adventageous enough on the > sun3 (much more secure, important new functionality) that I switched my > 3/60 to it. I can't disagree about the advantages of NetBSD over SunOS! ;-) Once I move production uses off my 3/280 and onto a new machine (will it be Pentium, PentiumPro, or DEC Alpha?) then I definitely will dump SunOS once and for all. I've more than enough SunOS-4 machines at clients to maintain that I won't miss it any! -- Greg A. Woods +1 416 443-1734 VE3TCP Planix, Inc. ; Secrets of the Weird - ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 22 Oct 1997 12:21:54 -0400 From: John DiMarco Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V10 #36 To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com In message <199710200331.WAA03051@tigger.net-kitchen.com> Mike Goumans writes: >I am looking for an sbus card that will run idi drives. Ive picked up a >gaggle of those 1 gig seagate sabres out of an older mass storage array >and i wanted to hook 4 of them up to my ipx. I guess its just something >about running a disk subsystem thats multiple times larger than the >machine its hooked up to that makes me want to do it. If someone has one >around, id be willing to trade the spare scsi + 10base t sbus card i have >in the machine not hooked up to anything. I presume you mean IPI, not idi. Yes, there did exist one third-party SBUS IPI controller, but it was rare and very expensive. I think you will be hard-pressed to find one. A VME IPI controller, on the other hand, should be easy to find. That doesn't help if all you have is an IPX, but if you own a VME-based machine, it may be possible to get working. Incidentally, we, at one point some years ago, had a 4/490 on campus using IPI, SMD and SCSI disks simultaneously. Worked fine. >Also i am looking for a sun4/6xx cpu board. CPUs and/or memory are not >required as i already have suitable modules and memory for it. Galaxy (6xx) memory consists of standard 30-pin SIMMS, and the CPUs are useable in SS10/SS20 systems (except for the weird dual-processor boards used in the 514 models, which don't fit in SS10/SS20s), so there's no need to insist on a galaxy motherboard if you want to make use of your modules and memory. While the Galaxy motherboard was a very nice piece of engineering (thanks, Chuck N. and team), and while I always wanted to build a desktop Galaxy system (i.e. a Sparcstation 4/610), they're not always that easy to find for a reasonable price. Regards, John -- John DiMarco Office: SF2101 CSLab Systems Manager Phone: 416-978-5300 University of Toronto Fax: 416-978-1931 http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~jdd - ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 15:35:43 -0400 (EDT) From: raub@kushana.aero.ufl.edu (Mauricio Tavares) Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V10 #36 To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com > AAA is the starting cylinder of the partition. BBB is the size of the > partition in blocks; CCC/D/E is the size in cylinders/tracks/sectors. > [tracks and sectors should always be 0 and 0, for historical reasons] > How much is a cylinder in blocks? > if you don't have it already, scsiinfo can interrogate any drive and > spit out a format.dat-style entry for it. get it. use it. love it. > I must have an old copy of scsiinfo because mine won't give me that... unless I do not know how to ask it for that. =( -- ===========================+========================================== | Mauricio Tavares | "We will attack... | | raub@kushana.aero.ufl.edu | ...under the cover of daylight!" Rimmer | ===========================+========================================== - ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 23 Oct 97 17:25:24 CST From: Adrian Corston Subject: Two heads are better than one (SS-I with two monitors) To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com Hello all, I have an SS-I with two cgthree cards, and I figure it's about time to get the second cgthree card up and running. On boot I see: cgthree0 at SBus slot 2 0x0 pri 7 cgthree1 at SBus slot 3 0x0 pri 7 So I'm halfway there. I run X11R4 (eek oh well). When I try to run: /usr/bin/X11/X -dev /dev/cgthree1 :1 I see this error: Fatal server bug! no screens found Abort (core dumped) A trace shows (in part): brk (0xbe8c0) = 0 gettimeofday (0xf7fffa18, 0) = 0 fcntl (2, 03, 0) = 2 fcntl (2, 04, 0x6) = 0 access ("/dev/cgthree1", 06) = 0 access ("/dev/cgthree1", 06) = 0 access ("/dev/cgthree1", 06) = 0 access ("/dev/cgthree1", 06) = 0 access ("/dev/cgthree1", 06) = 0 write (2, "\nFatal server bug!\n", 19) = Fatal server bug! 19 write (2, "no screens found", 16) = no screens found16 write (2, "\n", 1) = 1 fcntl (2, 03, 0) = 6 fcntl (2, 04, 0x2) = 0 sigblock (0x20) = 0 sigvec (6, 0xf7fff944, 0xf7fff938) = 0 sigvec (6, 0xf7fff8cc, 0) = 0 sigsetmask (0) = 0x20 So where am I going wrong? I've successfully run: /usr/bin/X11/X -dev /dev/cgthree0 :0 When I do this, trace shows "access ("/dev/cgthree0", 06) = 0" just once then quite happily continues on doing other things. Please forgive (and redirect!) me if SAH is the wrong list for this question. Cheers, -- Adrian Corston Internet Engineer Internode Professional Access - ------------------------------ End of Suns-at-Home Digest ******************************