Date: Tue, 1 Aug 89 15:22:12 EST From: Dwight D. McKay (The Moderator) Reply-To: Suns-at-Home@orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V2 #15 To: Suns-at-Home-List Suns-at-Home Digest Tue, 1 Aug 89 Volume 2 : Issue 15 Today's Topics: [Used Sun 2 equpiment for sale] Request for assistance with a newly aquired Sun-2 +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Submissions: suns-at-home \ @orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu | | Requests: suns-at-home-request > -- or -- | | Archives: suns-at-home-archives / ...rutgers!pur-ee!... | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [ Suns-at-Home has been slow going this summer as the mail traffic to ] [ list is very light and folks (including me) have been on vacation. ] [ Hang in there. We're still out here... --ddm ] From: ames!srs.UUCP!matt Subject: Suns@Home mailing list? [Used Sun2 equipment for sale] I talked with a Curt Freeland (?) today. He was interrested in purchasing some used Sun2 equipment that we have for sale (specifically a 4Mb memory board). I would really like to get rid of the whole system at once -- if at all possible. Mr. Freeland said that you run a suns-at-home mailing list, and I was wondering if you could post this to your list. Thanks, Matt Goheen ----- We probably paid on the order of $45,000 ($12,000 just for the memory!) for all of this equipment. Here's a list, and the prices: $2500 2/170 CPU, card cage, video card and power supply $600 six 1Mb memory boards OR $600 one 4Mb memory board and one 1Mb board (freebie) $500 Xylogics 450 controller $300 Sky FFP $400 ie ethernet card $200 ec ethernet card $500 sc SCSI controller (has four extra serial ports as well) $250 70 Scotch (or similar) DC 300XL Or, I'll sell everything (including all six 1 Mb memory boards, but not the 4Mb board, or visa-versa) for $4000. You will have to pay for shipping or arrange to pick it up. Note that there is no working monitor with this system. Also, the 4Mb board does not work in conjunction with the 1Mb memory boards. I don't know why. It has never worked (you get parity errors several times a day if you try). Therefore, all of our Sun2s have 4Mb of memory, either four 1 Mb boards, or one 4 Mb board (you can only put in 4 memory boards total). I will sell the single 4Mb board and one 1Mb board (but, as I've said above -- I don't recommend mixing them) as a group OR all six 1Mb boards as a group. Here is a message I sent out to someone else interrested in the equipment. ----------begin included message---------- >From matt Mon Jun 19 14:25:36 1989 Subject: RE: Sun equipment > 4 Mb of memory > 4 "spare" Mb of memory > Xylogics 450 controller > ie ethernet card > ec ethernet card (?) > sc SCSI controller (has four serial ports) (?) > video card (but no monitor) > > Actually, I don't think I've ever seen a Sun 2/170. Isn't it > in a 6 foot rack with a 9 track tape drive? Well, it probably could be. Actually, the computer itself is a black 18" cube, with a 15 slot backplane. It has screw slots so that it can be easily mounted in a standard rack. For comparison, the 2/120 has the same CPU, but comes in a 6 slot pedestal enclosure, with the option of a 1/4" cartridge tape mounted in the top of the housing. > Questions: > What do you mean by "spare" memory? If you want it, I can sell you an extra 4 Mb memory board. See below... > Can't it be used with the other 4 megs? Unfortunately, no it can't. The Sun 2/170 and 2/120 series could only have 7 Mb of memory, because the video memory lives at the 8 Mb boundry. If only it were that simple. We have about six 1 Mb boards from Sun. We also have about five 4 Mb boards from some 3rd party manufacturer (LCF?) that, I believe, has since gone out of business. Within the Sun backplane, there are 5 available slots for memory cards and the CPU. They talk to each other on the P2 (?) portion of the backplane, and the first 5 slots have the P2 portion isolated from the rest of the bus. The last tidbit is that the 4Mb boards and the 1 Mb boards CAN'T be mixed within the same machine. We have never figured out why, they both work fine when not mixed. Therefore, you can either fill up the first 5 slots with four 1 Mb boards and the CPU, or you can use one 4 Mb board, because you can't have 8 Mb of memory in the thing w/o messing up the video controller! You may be able to have 8 (or more) Mb of memory if you don't use the video board (and be sure to remove the video driver from the kernel). I haven't tried it, although I don't know why I haven't -- we have a 2/170 sitting in our computer room with no monitor and only 4 Mb of memory. > Or are they 1 meg simms that take up all the slots? The Sun 2/170 was built before simms were even evented. It is a Multibus machine, and it uses custom Sun Multibus memory boards (I don't think standard Multibus memory will work). The 1 Mb boards use 64K chips, and the whizzy 4 Mb boards use the snazzy, state of the art 256K chips (well, they were at the time). > I assume the video card supports the 19 inch monochrome? Yes. However, there are some minor differences between the 19" monitors used on Sun2s and Sun3s. Some of our early Sun2 monitors can't be used on Sun3s (I don't know electrical differences, and you may be able to modify one w/o too much trouble either way). Later Sun2 and all Sun3 systems that we have, have two small jumpers inside that have to be moved in order to have the monitors work when changing architectures. All our monitors are Moniterm monitors, I don't know about the Phillips monitors. > I assume the backplane and CPU are intact? Naturally, it was the computer I used in my office up until about two weeks ago. I don't know if I mentioned (except though lack of mentioning) that there is no working monitor with the system. > Just to be on the safe side, better spell out the ie, ec, and sc > abbreviations above. The ie is the "Intel 10 Mb/s Ethernet interface". See the man page for "ie" (if you have a Sun around). It is far superior to the ec Ethernet board, ("3Com 10 Mb/s Ethernet interface", again, consult the manual for "ec"). The reason it is far superior is due to the amount of on board memory on the ie board. The ec board can only handle about four Ethernet packets before dropping one (if they come in fast). This does not bode well for NFS or nd, because they use UDP to send packets around and file system blocks are generally 8 Kb, and pages are 8 Kb on a network of Sun3s. Since Ethernet packets are something like 1500 bytes, the ec contoller ends up dropping a couple, and the whole thing (all 8Kb) have to be resent!! However, if you are on a network of all Sun2 systems, the ec boards work fine because the Sun2 page size is 2Kb. The sc is the SCSI host adaptor board. See the manual pages for "st" and "sd". I don't know if we really want to sell this board, since it is our only one. We aren't currently using it because our SCSI tape is broken (and has been for over a year). We have no SCSI disks hooked to it -- and never have. This board also has 4 extra serial ports (see the man page for "zs"). The Xylogics 450 is an SMD disk controller. It can run disks with rates up to 2.4 Mb/sec (i.e. a Fujitsu Eagle class disk). It can't be used with some of the newer disks that have transfer rates of 3.0 Mb/sec. or above. This is one of the supported boot devices (as is the sc controller). It can serve up to four disks with three different disk geometries (I think, perhaps it can do four different types). Something I forgot to mention is that we have a Sky FFP that we can sell. It speeds floating point operations to be about 1/2 as fast as a Sun 3/60 with 68881 (I think). I know it made one of our programs run 5 times faster when we used it. Here is a note I sent to a colleague about a year ago: From matt Tue May 10 15:50:23 1988 To: chuck Subject: interresting b2l (lpc) statistics I've been playing around with the source to b2l. I made a few versions of the program to see what worked best: b2l.68881: -f68881 -mc68020 -O b2l.sky: -fsky -mc68010 -O b2l: -fsoft -mc68010 -O The "sky" version will only run on jason, the "68881" version runs on srs, dash or flash. Some times for '"B2L" -i.b -l.lpc filename': Machine: flash Version: b2l u: 61.8; s: 0.3; r: 1:03; pg: 0; sw: 0 u: 64.4; s: 0.6; r: 1:10; pg: 0; sw: 0 u: 61.7; s: 0.2; r: 1:03; pg: 0; sw: 0 Machine: flash Version: b2l.68881 u: 26.2; s: 0.5; r: 0:28; pg: 0; sw: 0 u: 27.8; s: 0.3; r: 0:29; pg: 0; sw: 0 u: 28.2; s: 0.2; r: 0:29; pg: 0; sw: 0 Machine: jason Version: b2l u: 238.4; s: 45.7; r: 6:13; pg: 0; sw: 0 u: 232.5; s: 22.6; r: 4:52; pg: 0; sw: 0 Machine: jason Version: b2l.sky u: 44.7; s: 11.8; r: 1:23; pg: 0; sw: 0 u: 43.9; s: 4.4; r: 0:52; pg: 0; sw: 0 u: 44.9; s: 5.6; r: 0:58; pg: 0; sw: 0 I guess it must use quite a bit of floating point. I'm amazed that the b2l.sky version beats out the b2l version running on a Sun3, must be the sky board is a little faster than I thought. (Note that jason is the 2/170 that is for sale, flash is a 3/60) ... [ old list of stuff and prices removed ] ... ----------end included message---------- Call or write TODAY! Address: Matthew Goheen Speech Recognition Systems 1895 Mt. Hope Ave. Rochester, NY 14620 Phone: (716) 271-0600 Email: matt@srs.uucp, matt%srs.uucp@harvard.harvard.edu ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 Jul 89 21:43:44 CST From: Simon Hackett Subject: Request for assistance with a newly aquired Sun-2 To: suns-at-home@orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu Hi people. I have just come into posession of an old Sun-2/120, about which I know almost nothing (although I know a reasonable amount about Sun-3's and Sun-4's, since I use them all day at work) I want to ask if anyone can help with some of the strange things it does, and I would be most most grateful for any help anyone can give me about thse things. The system is a 2/120 with two MaxStor SCSI disks (100mb each, I think), a tape drive in a separate box with one of the drives, ethernet, half a dozen serial ports, and 6MB of ram. It currently has SunOS 3.5 on it. It used to serve several 2/50's over the network. #1: The system crashes periodically, always with the same error: Parity Error! Bus Error Reg 4e91 followed, after a moderate delay, by: Can't find parity error (transient?) panic: parity error then a normal dump/reboot cycle begins. This seems to happen if I exercise the machine hard in memory terms (e.g. run suntools, start opening lots of windows) #2: the system takes ages before the monitor will work properly, before this the monitor display is stuffed, horizintally stretched and blurry to the point of unreadibility. If I leave it on for a while, then power cycle it (the monitor) a few times, it comes good. It's a bit wonky at the edges even so, but I think this is just age. I expect this is just a dry solder joint somewhere. Pointers about exactly where are welcomed. #3: It seems to be running on two disk controllers, each running to an adaptec ACB-4000 SCSI-to-ST506 controller card. I also have an ACB-4070 RLL controller card, which apparently works but had too high an error rate with the maxstor drives to be practical. "sd0" works ok - but "sd2" doesn't, and reports an error when I attempt to mount it: sd2d: unknown cmd recoverable sense key(0x1): soft error, error code(0x1c): bad format sd2: warning, block 0x0 has failed xxx times where "xxx" rises on each attempt. Now I'm not sure what to make of #3, I don't know whether that means there just isn't a cable plugged in, or whether I need to try a reformat to get sense out of the drive. I would especially appreciate any pointers about #1 above, I suspect one of the ram boards is dodgy, but it might just need a bloody good clean of the connectors and sockets (the whole system box needs this!). I think I have 2MB on one board and 4MB on another one (not 100% sure though). can I work out from the "4e91" bit where in ram the problem is? Any help gratefully appreciated. Sorry if any of this seems silly, but I know very little about sun-2 diagnostic errors. Cheers, Simon Hackett {--------------------------------------------------------------------------} { Simon Hackett, Systems Group, University of Adelaide, South Australia } { E-mail: simon@sirius.ua.oz.au Phone: (Australia) 08 228 5669 } {--------------------------------------------------------------------------} ------------------------------ End of Suns-at-Home Digest ******************************