Date: Mon, 29 Jan 90 11:05:46 EST From: Dwight D. McKay (The Moderator) Reply-To: Suns-at-Home@orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V3 #4 To: Suns-at-Home-List Suns-at-Home Digest Mon, 29 Jan 90 Volume 3 : Issue 4 Today's Topics: my broken sun-2/120 - many thanks New Magazine sun2/120 cpu board fixed at last - here's the story - quite fun! sun2 failing in that way Sun2 parts for sale +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Submissions: suns-at-home \ @orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu | | Requests: suns-at-home-request > -- or -- | | Archives: suns-at-home-archives / ...rutgers!pur-ee!... | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [I've included Simon's complete Sun2 "saga" here. Debugging is such fun...] Date: Wed, 24 Jan 90 17:15:59 CST From: Simon Hackett Subject: my broken sun-2/120 - many thanks To: suns-at-home@orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu To everyone who replied to my message, many thanks. I have now managed to narrow things down, I now know I have a hardware fault on the cpu board. I know this because I just borrowed a sun-1 cpu and put my proms into it, and that is now running my system quite happily. (the cpu boards are really the same as a sun-1 board) so, I'm now going to try to work out what's wrong with my original cpu board, by chip-swapping and head scratching. If anyone has access to schematics for a sun-2 system, I would be grateful (and would happily pay for) a copy of same. I'm grateful to all the kind people reading what I'm posting and taking the time to respond. Actually, I'll push the friendship a little by asking if anyone knows how to get two 4mb ram boards to run in the same sun-2 system at once. I have been told that these boards will work to give you a total of 7 mb of ram (you can't use the last 1mb since it clashes with the video card ram). But the boards only have one jumper set on them, and I can't sort out how to make the second board work to get more than 4mb available to me. Any pointers appreciated. Apparently with the 4mb board came, originally, a piece of paper explaining how to do it. This piece of paper is long gone :-) Simon Hackett -- {----------------------------------------------------------------------------} { Simon Hackett, Communications/Systems, University of Adelaide, Australia } { E-mail: simon@ucs.adelaide.edu.au Phone: (Australia) 08 228 5669 } {----------------------------------------------------------------------------} ------------------------------ [ I'm including this due to it's A) being free and B) usefulness to used ] [ Sun owners in search of parts, etc. --ddm ] Date: 22 Jan 90 14:44:45 EST (Mon) From: wilk@cinnet.com (Ken Wilkinson) Subject: New Magazine To: suns-at-home@orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu Dear Moderator, I have the following press release that I would like to distribute to your readers. We are marketing a magazine which will initially be given away, and I wish to achieve a high subscripion rate as fast as possible. It was reported to me that your readers have Sun computers and would be ideal candiates for this type of magazine. If you have any question, please don't hesitate to call me at the toll free number. Ken Wilkinson Editor-in-Chief Used Computer Locator --------------------------Press release follows! ----------------------- Subject: Press Release Date: 1/16/90; for immediate release From: Ken Wilkinson The Used Computer Locator 2314 Iowa Ave. Cincinnati, Ohio 45206 Phone (800) 359-7160 Fax (513) 751-6463 BBS (513) 751-0659 Usenet wilk@cinnet.com Welcome to a new concept in Magazines! The Used Computer Locator Magazine is a new national publication with the sole purpose of putting buyers and sellers of used, or surplus computers, electronics, ham radio, and like equipment, in touch with each other in a inexpensive medium. The magazine is initially being given away free to qualified buyers and sellers of used or surplus equipment as "shareware". That is, if you find the magazine useful, pay us what you think it is worth to you. The magazine is divide into the following sections: Software Marketplace Got any old, surplus software? Not using that CPM spreadsheet program any longer? Sell unused, or surplus software here. Prices for ads begin at $25 dollars. The $500 Marketplace This section allows anyone with something to sell with a value of less than $500 very inexpensive advertising. In this section, all ads are priced $25 for 25 words. Want ads Find that hard to get replacement part, system or software by placing a want ad with 25 words for only $25! Surplus Electronics Sources for surplus computer, electronics, ham radio, and memory chips. Look here for the latest prices and selection of surplus electronics equipment and instruments. Buyers Market Any computer related equipment or service would be found in this area. Networks, Systems and Mainframes Used or surplus network hardware, minicomputers, mainframe systems, and telcom PBXs. Have you upgraded to an MS-DOS or Macintosh computer? Sell that old CPM Osborne or Kaypro computer to a dedicated CPM user who is dying to get spare parts or a duplicate system. Even Software can be sold! Sell that old Wordstar or Visicalc program! Market your used Perkin-Elmer, Digital, and other minicomputers here. No computer or system is too small or too large to advertise! Reach buyers of computers and systems of all sizes by advertising in the Used Computer Locator. Colleges and Schools Announce your bid notices here for a wider audience. Sell/buy your equipment here for the best national selection. -------------------------- End of Press Release ----------------------- ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Jan 90 17:47:00 CST From: Simon Hackett Subject: sun2/120 cpu board fixed at last - here's the story - quite fun! To: suns-at-home@orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu Wow, sometimes things do go your own way. I have diagnosed the fault in my 2/120 cpu board, and I thought I'd explain how I managed it, in case it helps someone else fix something similar sometime. Thanks to those who offered assistance, especially Kevin Sheehan from Sun, who suggested I adb my kernel since I could use L1-A to stop the hung system, and had thus got the pc where the system appeared to be looping. In fact, I'd written down a list of the pc's each time I stopped the system with L1-A - and it was clearly stuck in a loop somewhere. Now the breakthrough started when I got a sun-1 cpu board which I could use to bring the system up - then I could run adb on my /vmunix image to find out where those PC's actually were. First I had to learn how to use adb - I'd been meaning to do that for ages. Dead simple. Now, it turned out that ALL the PC's I tried feeding into adb returned instructions inside a routine called "zslevel6intr". Lights go on - "zs" is of course the serial driver, and I now remember that my ttya and ttyb ports didn't seem to work anyway (:-) ). I've never tried them out properly, since I have a console and an ethernet connection. I had a look at my SunOS 4.0.3 source code (gee this is useful to have) and confirmed that this routine contains a (potentially) endless loop polling any serial chips in the system for a status bit to indicate that they were responsible for the interrupt which has just gone off. So I hatch the theory that the culprit must be the Z8530 serial chip on the cpu board. I swapped in the Z8530 from the working sun-1 cpu board, and: wow! the system works perfectly again with my own cpu board! Needless to say, this makes me somewhat happier :-) So: the moral of the story is that during early stages of boot, facilities like virtual memory and interrupts aren't enabled, so if a system fails at the point mine did, it implies something to do with interrupt handling might be at fault. In this case, the serial chip was dead, but the power-up self tests didn't (couldn't?) detect it. The relevant code in zslevel6 could also do with some timeout code, so the user eventually gets told why his system is dead :-) Cheers, Simon Hackett -- {----------------------------------------------------------------------------} { Simon Hackett, Communications/Systems, University of Adelaide, Australia } { E-mail: simon@ucs.adelaide.edu.au Phone: (Australia) 08 228 5669 } {----------------------------------------------------------------------------} ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Jan 90 11:53:32 EST From: edp@sunrock.East.Sun.COM (Ed Pendzik {Prof Services} Sun Rochester) Subject: sun2 failing in that way To: Suns-at-Home@orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu Hello down under in adelaide, my favorite city in OZ. What's the temp today, as you move into summer? I was in your home town this time last year visting relatives and sucking down coopers. sounds like NFS or yp hanging. your right, the next thing after "using x buffers" /etc/rc.boot gets run. check out that sh is ok and that the rc scripts are not corrupt. can you boot single user? if not boot mini-unix and check out rc.boot rc and rc.local. make sure nfs and yp are not getting started. put echo's on the rc files ever so often to see whats going on. If this works I'd like a case of coopers posted to me. :-) Ed Pendzik ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Jan 90 03:17:43 EST From: tomasz@cs.fit.edu (Thomas Maliszewski/ADVISOR-E. Strother) Subject: Sun2 parts for sale To: suns-at-home@orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu Hi there! I have the following sun2/120 hardware for sale: * 6 x 1Mb ram boards * 2 x serial cards * 2 x ethernet cards (1 x sun + 1 x 3com) * 2 x cpu * 2 x 750W power supplies * 2 x optical mouse + pads * 2 x 19" BW monitors * 2 x cable, chasis, enclosures * 1 x complete manuals (no racks) * 2 x keybords (1 x soft + 1 x tacktile) Make me an offer, I might not refuse :-) Tom ------------------------------ End of Suns-at-Home Digest ******************************