Date: Sun, 20 Dec 98 14:55:21 EST From: Dwight McKay (The Moderator) Reply-To: Suns-at-Home@net-kitchen.com Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V11 #35 To: Suns-at-Home-List Suns-at-Home Digest Sun, 20 Dec 98 Volume 11 : Issue 35 Today's Topics: An external CD ROM for a SPARCstation floppy problem Implementing PPP on a Sun 3/80 Solaris for $16 Sun386i boot disks Suns-at-Home Digest V11 #34 Upgrading Sparc 2? Upgrading to a SPARCstation 2 Will IBM DCHS drive work in Sparc 2? +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Submissions: suns-at-home@net-kitchen.com | | Requests: suns-at-home-request@net-kitchen.com | | WWW Archive access: http://www.net-kitchen.com/~sah | +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1998 22:37:32 -0600 From: "dan" Subject: An external CD ROM for a SPARCstation To: Thank you to those who responded to my request for info about a boot floppy for my SPARCstation 2/Sun OS 4.1.1 that I have. What I wound up doing was finding an external CD (details below), and booting to single-user, then fsck and mount /etc. Was then able to edit passwd and look around. These were apparently clients on an Oracle network, but it is interesting trying to get them recognized on my TCP/IP network. This was the only solution that was available, since the floppies on each of these The floppies on both machines appear to be disabled, (fdformat returns (fd0: write failed (40 1 0), a check density? I/O error, and something about an IOCTL error when I try other commands with the floppy. On both machines they show up, but are unusable. Eject works, same error with different floppies, so I am trying to figure out why they don't work. There are several device drivers fd0 and similar, and the drivers appear identical to those from another SPARCstation 2 I can dial into. I read somewhere that support needed to be compiled into the kernel, so perhaps I will find out when I blow this away and find something else to put on the drive. The external CD is a Plextor 6 speed, PX-6XCS. I bought from http://www.pieceby.com/, (nice folks) in an enclosure called a Micronet MR-90C, a Mac peripheral which originally came with a SyQuest drive. It did not work at first, booting with a target ID of 5 yet showing an ID of 6 when I did a probe scsi. Opened it up and found that the wires that go to the SCSI id were moved over 1 set too far, moved 'em back, works great. Hope that might help someone, the info I had here said only a Sun drive or a Toshiba 3301, 3401 would work, it was nice to find another combo. I was originally offered some docs and software for this box, but that person later reneged on the offer. So, I am looking for docs on the box, perhaps an old Answerbook, (I think that is what is was called then) and a copy of Solaris 2.6, if anyone has one. I got the 2.7, but I am told that 2.6 might be better on this as yet too small hard drive and too little memory. I will probably try Linux at some point, but I wanted to work with 2.6 for awhile. Thank you. - ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1998 09:59:09 -0600 (CST) From: Dan Storie Subject: floppy problem To: suns-at-home@tigger.net-kitchen.com I have 2 sparcstations, SunOS 4.1.1, bought from their owner who used them at the same facility in about '93 or so. The floppy gives the same error on both machines. # fdformat fd0: write failed (40 1 0) fd0: bad format fdformat: check density? i/o error eject works on both drives tried multiple floppy disks, including 2 that worked on sparc 2 that is currently in a production environment I would think it is the drive if just one drive, but with both giving the same message, it would seem to be something I have not figured out yet. I did rebuild the kernels with the GENERIC file, which has a line that indicates floppy support is configured in, but no change after reboot. And I have looked for several hours for web links that might be associated with something like that. The only one I found was someone trying to run Sparc executeables on a BSD platform, getting the same message. thanks for your time dan - ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1998 17:41:03 -0800 (PST) From: David Wolfskill Subject: Implementing PPP on a Sun 3/80 To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com, hregan@my-dejanews.com >Date: Fri, 04 Dec 1998 03:53:38 -0700 >From: "Harry J. Regan" >I've got a Sun 3/80 running SunOS 4.1.1_U1 and I want to run PPP to connect it to my ISP. I built the pppd sources, but when I install them, it complains that the kernel needs a patch to operate pppd. Does anyone out there know which kerrnel patch (or patches) is/are required? Not sure what version of ppp you're trying yto use. I'm using ppp-2.2 (December, 1994) on a Sun 3/60 (SunOS 4.1.1_U1); I don't recall any need for a patch, and I didn't see anything about such a thing in a cursory glance through the sources. Not sure where I picked it up; the NOTES file says: Bugs to: paulus@cs.anu.edu.au Paul Mackerras Dept. of Computer Science Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200 AUSTRALIA I could probably bundle up the sources into a tarball & put them on an FTP site for a while, if that would help. Cheers, david -- David H. Wolfskill david@dhw.vip.best.com As a computing professional, I believe it would be unethical for me to advise, recommend, or support the use (save possibly for personal amusement) of any product that is or depends on any Microsoft product. - ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1998 23:41:54 PST From: "Nanker Phelge" Subject: Solaris for $16 To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com Sun has a great offer through their Developer Connection.You can now get a personal use copy of Solaris 7 for both SPARC and x86 for $10 plus shipping and handling.I just got mine and although it's kind of bloated for early SPARC hardware,it's a good deal for later machines or for fast Intel hardware. Just go to the Developer Connection and sign up from there.You have to be a member,but it's free. Has anyone tried the Happy Hacking Keyboard on a SPARC yet? ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 11:09:38 +0000 From: "David Cantrell" Subject: Sun386i boot disks To: suns-at-home@tigger.net-kitchen.com, ari.reen@ntc.nokia.com As sun386i.mono.org has had problems recently, I took a snapshot of it. My copy is at http://typhoon.wirestation.co.uk:8080/sun386i. It's not available from me via ftp. -- David - http://www.ThePentagon.com/NukeEmUp Old computers ever die, they just get emulated. - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 09:45:41 -0500 (EST) From: Rick Leir EPS Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V11 #34 To: Dwight McKay > I've got a Sun 3/80 running SunOS 4.1.1_U1 and I want to run PPP to > connect it to my ISP. I built the pppd sources, but when I install > them, it complains that the kernel needs a patch to operate pppd. Does > anyone out there know which kerrnel patch (or patches) is/are required? Since Sun has dropped SunOS and moved on to Solaris, you might be wasting your effort. You would do better with OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD. Rick Leir rleir@igs.net 613-828-8289 http://www.igs.net/~rleir - Fight for web standards. http://www.webstandards.org The WaSP! - ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 20 Dec 1998 02:18:07 -0500 From: Brian Neal Subject: Upgrading Sparc 2? To: harbeson@garlic.com Hi Pete. Well, you haven't got too many options. The POWERUP replacement chips don't provide very much speed, and there are caveats to the replacement motherboards. My 110 MHz SS5 Axil board was giving me ten kinds of hell, until the temperature dropped. The SS2 chassis just doesn't have adequate cooling (I even removed a disk drive and added a big 3 1/2" brushless fan). Also, the 110 MHz version requires 60ns ram. I am currently looking at Sun's low-end Ultra line to replace my SPARCstation. I've been looking around and it seems that Sun offers an excellent trade-in program. For your old SS2 and about $2500 you can get a new Ultra 5 (that's what it says on the website, anyway). My only concern is that the Ultra 5 and 10 machines both use IDE disks. All things considered, the SS5 replacement motherboard isn't a bad board. It offers a signifigant performance boost at 110 MHz and provides some extra features, like support for 72-pin SIMMs and a parallel port. You just need to run your box in some place a little colder than Florida. :) -Brian Neal ----------------------------- Date: Wed, 9 Dec 1998 11:05:20 -0800 (PST) From: Pete Harbeson Subject: Upgrading Sparc 2? To: suns-at-home@tigger.net-kitchen.com I'd like to get more processing speed than my Sparc 2 can provide. Can anyone offer me some advice about what would give me the best price-performance? I think my options are: -Upgrade the Sparc2 CPU -Replace the Sparc2 motherboard with something faster -Replace the whole Sparc2 with more recent used equipment (and which model?) I'd like to get the system to a point where using FrameMaker will be relatively painless. Better serial-port performance than the Sparc2 would also be good to have. Thanks! ---- Peter J. Harbeson Technical Writing, Instructional Design, Help System Development voice: 408-779-4886 fax: 408-782-9525 harbeson@garlic.com - ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 15 Dec 98 21:03:47 -0800 From: "Paul Khoury" Subject: Upgrading to a SPARCstation 2 To: "Suns-at-Home-List@tigger.net-kitchen.com" , I'm going to buy a new SPARCstation 2, and finally get a CRT, to replace my old (and still untested) IPC. Is there any advantages besides speed and the built-in CG3 that I will have with the SPARC 2? I'd also like to hook up a Wyse 60 dumb terminal, but don't know what kind of cables I need. I think I can figure out how to use admintool to change it, though. (And the terminal does work, BTW). Also, can almost any SCSI-2 HD be used in a SPARC? It supposedly comes with 400MB, either 1 400 or 2 200's, but I might want to upgrade to Solaris 2.6 (I have 2.4 now), thus needing more space. Also, is 64MB the maximum I can go on that machine? Last question, anyone interested in a used AS-IS IPC? I won't need it once I get my SPARC 2 up. Thanks for answering my questions, -- Paul Khoury | | Sent from my K5-200 http://warped.cswnet.com/~pkhoury/index.html Running OS/2 3/4, Win NT 4.0, Mac OS 7.5.3, Sun Solaris 2.3, Linux 2.0.29, Newton OS 2.0 ICQ#22543041 AIM - pkhoury12 - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 07:19:40 -0500 From: "M. Kovarski" Subject: Will IBM DCHS drive work in Sparc 2? To: Hi, I have a 4 gig. IBM DCHS drive that I would like to connect to a sparc = 2. Has anyone done it before and got it working? Any suggestions = appreciated. Thanks, Mark K. - ------------------------------ End of Suns-at-Home Digest ******************************