Date: Mon, 11 Mar 91 15:14:16 EST From: Dwight D. McKay (The Moderator) Reply-To: Suns-at-Home@orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V4 #9 To: Suns-at-Home-List Suns-at-Home Digest Mon, 11 Mar 91 Volume 4 : Issue 9 Today's Topics: cheap Sparcstation backups (summary) Need info about upgrading 3/60 Sun-1/100U trivia Sun 386i's +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Submissions: suns-at-home \ @orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu | | Requests: suns-at-home-request > -- or -- | | Archives: suns-at-home-archives / ...rutgers!pur-ee!... | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 25 Feb 91 13:57:26 PST From: eggert@twinsun.com (Paul Eggert) Subject: cheap Sparcstation backups (summary) To: suns-at-home@orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu A couple of weeks ago I asked about good strategies for backing up a solo Sparcstation package at home. Thanks to everbody who responded. Here are edited summaries of your ideas. 8mm media cost is more like .25 cents/MB, and DAT is 1.2 cents/MB. And an 8mm subsystem can be had for only $2K. 8mm is more widely used than DAT, and is a better interchange media, even though it's slow. -- Joe McGuckin GNU tar does support compression. But beware its incremental dump feature. When installing a system, symlink the newest file in that system to NEWEST; to dump, do ``find {fs} -xdev -newer {fs}/NEWEST -print | gtar -T - ...''. -- Jim Frew This, like most other `find'-based schemes, relies on newline-free filenames. Borrow an 8mm drive from work for a few hours each month. Floppy incrementals are possible, but error-prone. Consider getting another disk -- it'll make your system more robust. -- Hilarie K. Orman The best backup route depends on how much you want to back up. For just 200MB, QIC-150 seems best; if you plan on buying some 1.2 GB drives soon, go with 8mm. For now, you can borrow a tape drive from work and just do incrementals to floppies. -- Chris Buckley Buy a 150 MB tape - that's what I did. Media cost is not the issue for a small system, but initial cost and your time are. Floppies aren't the answer. -- David G. Hough To save money, build a QIC subsystem yourself. $25 (computer fair prices) to $200 (new) for box, cables, and power supply, plus either $300 for a 60 MB cartridge drive from Weird Stuff Warehouse, or $400 for a used QIC-150 drive from TMC, or maybe $400 for QIC-150 Archive Viper drives from IME. -- Dale Carstensen and wayne@teemc.tmc.mi.org Get another hard disk, and dump to disk, possibly compressed. This is much faster. The disk can be cheap, slow, and noisy, because you can power it off when not backing up. -- Michael Helm Disadvantage: no good for long-term backups, or if both disks fry. If you buy a $2K disk subsystem, you can get a QIC-150 drive thrown in for about $500 more. -- Ellery Chan and Dale Carstensen I'll switch to tape soon, 8mm if I can afford it, QIC-150 otherwise. -- Paul Eggert PS. Don't trust Sun's tar and cpio for serious backups. tar limits path names to only 100 bytes. cpio (silently!) loses files if two or more files's inode numbers are congruent modulo 2**16. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 11 Mar 91 14:54:48 EST From: bseller!brad@uunet.UU.NET (Brad Seller) Subject: Need info about upgrading 3/60 To: uunet!orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu!suns-at-home@uunet.UU.NET (Suns-at-Home) I have a 3/60 at home that I would like to upgrade cheaply. There are two places I think I need help in. The first is, I have a "spare" disk that I am reasonably sure will work in the shoebox, but it seems that I need some type of mounting kit to get the disk to stay in the box. My Sun rep says its no longer available, so does anyone know where I can find such a beast? I also need a cable, but I think I can make it myself (just 3 connectors and a piece of ribbon cable). The question is, doest the first or second drive connector need to be "twisted" a la most PC drive cables? Also, I am sure this has been beat to death before, but it appears that the 3/60 uses ordinary 1 MB/80 ns SIMMS. Am I missing something, or can I just purchase 1x9 80ns SIMMS from my local, and cheap PC supplier, or is there some magic that I am missing? I currently have 8 MB, and would like to go to 12 or 16. If there are any horror stories, I would welcome the info before I plunk down $45 - $60 per SIMM. Thanks to all that can help. Since this is probably old info, if people would like to e-mail me responses, I will post a summary, as well as any success or failures I encounter. Brad Seller uunet!bseller!brad ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 26 Feb 91 00:07:51 EST From: dupuy@hudson.cs.columbia.edu (Alexander Dupuy) Subject: Sun-1/100U trivia To: Pat Barron , Suns-at-Home@orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu Wow. It's been a while, but here's what I remember about our dearly departed Sun-1/100U and Sun-1/150U machines (including serial #s 16 and 18)! Differences from Sun-2 series: ROPC (raster-op chip) drives display; no memory mapped access to framebuffer. SunOS 4.0.3 still has /dev/ropc Parallel I/O for keyboard and mouse; pi0 kernel driver is still in 4.0.3, and is required[!] for Multibus machines with serial (zs1) mice, because of a bug in the initconsole code. Two backplane models: Prime and non-Prime. I don't know the difference but the P2 connectors, as in all Multibus suns, are for the fast memory bus. Special bus-terminating board for machines without video board in last slot. Interphase 2010 disk controller (ip0) - support phased out in 3.x Octal serial card - support phased out in 3.x Differences from Sun-1 series: 68010 processor supports instruction restarts on page faults (VM) This last might be the limitation on the earliest release of Unix (not SunOS! that came later) which you could run on a 1/100U. The very earliest Unix which the Suns ran was a Unisoft 68000 port of (V7? System III? System V?) but it might not run on a 68010 (different stack format on interrupts). @alex -- inet: dupuy@cs.columbia.edu uucp: ...!rutgers!cs.columbia.edu!dupuy ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 26 Feb 91 08:03:59 PST From: nhess@us.oracle.com (Nate Hess) Subject: Sun 386i's To: sun-386i@sc3d118mc.acq.osd.mil, suns-at-home@orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu Howdy! I'm encountering a weirdness with my Sun 386i that I thought someone might have a solution for. I've been running seashell, my home box, with a SLIP connection but without an ethernet connection for quite some time, and it's always booted up fine. Last night, after I changed the Internet address of seashell, put some stuff in /etc/rc.local, and then did a shutdown -r, the thing came back up and asked whether I wanted to connect to a network or configure as a standalone machine. I was rather confused why it was suddenly asking me this, but I said standalone. It then proceeded to write a new /etc/hosts, passwd, group, etc. and come up. After I restored those files, I rebooted again, and sure enough, it came back and asked that same question. It even asks it when I try to boot in single user mode, so there seems to be no way to around this reconfiguration. Is there any way to bring seashell up so that I can poke around, without having to reconfigure? Any idea why it started thinking that it needs to configure, so I can straighten it out? Thanks, --woodstock -- "What I like is when you're looking and thinking and looking and thinking...and suddenly you wake up." - Hobbes nhess@us.oracle.com or ...!uunet!oracle!nhess or (415) 506-2650 ------------------------------ End of Suns-at-Home Digest ******************************