Date: Mon, 25 Mar 91 13:09:24 EST From: Dwight D. McKay (The Moderator) Reply-To: Suns-at-Home@orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V4 #11 To: Suns-at-Home-List Suns-at-Home Digest Mon, 25 Mar 91 Volume 4 : Issue 11 Today's Topics: 4/110 with PBox disk space, floppies [V4 #10] Machine wants to reconfigure (was Sun 386i's) Memory upgrade for Sun 3/50 Suns-at-Home Digest V4 #9 (2 msgs) +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Submissions: suns-at-home \ @orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu | | Requests: suns-at-home-request > -- or -- | | Archives: suns-at-home-archives / ...rutgers!pur-ee!... | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 18 Mar 91 12:11:42 PST From: wild@Eng.Sun.COM (Will Doherty) Subject: 4/110 with PBox To: suns-at-home@orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu Has anyone succeeded in getting a 4/100 to work with a PBox? If so, please let me know how. Thanks, Will Doherty wild@Eng.sun.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 18 Mar 91 13:24:54 PST From: Stuart Marks Subject: disk space, floppies [V4 #10] To: suns-at-home@orchestra.ecn.purdue.edu gcd@einstein.bgsu.edu (Comer Duncan) writes: I am wondering what people who configure Suns-at-Home from SparcStations such as SLC or SS1 are considering as minimum needed disk attached with enough space to hold the OS AND have enough left to do 'useful work'? I use an IPC with a 200M internal disk. This is big enough to hold the OS, SunView, OpenWindows (with a minimal set of fonts), epoch (a multi-window version of gnu emacs), and MH. There's about 20M or so left over. The system came preconfigured with 35M of swap, which is more than I need, so I could reclaim some space from there if I repartitioned the disk. Also, I don't use SunView much, so I could save some space by deleting it. The bottom line is that I can work on some small projects fairly comfortably, and there's still more stuff I could get rid of if I needed to. However, if you need to work on a big project, another disk is in order. Is the option of using a floppy to transport files back and forth from home to work a really practical solution? Yes, for small to medium-sized projects. I regularly transfer about 30,000 lines of source code using floppies. The SCCS files take up about 2.4M, which fits quite nicely onto two floppies. (If I didn't use SCCS, it would be quite a bit smaller -- about 760K.) Before transfer, I make sure everything's checked in, and then I just copy all the SCCS files. A box of floppies can hold a lot of source code. The "bar" utility handles multiple floppies gracefully. It takes a minute or so to fill up a floppy. Thus, the overhead involved in copying things to and from floppy is only a couple minutes a day. What takes more time is recompiling everything once it's on disk. You can get far more sophisticated about transferring and recompiling only files that have changed recently. That will make use of floppies much more efficient. However, for a project the size I'm working on, transferring the whole thing works well. Good luck, s'marks Stuart W. Marks ARPA: smarks@eng.sun.com Windows & Graphics Software UUCP: sun!smarks Sun Microsystems, Inc. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 24 Mar 91 15:42:04 pst From: well!shiva@apple.com (Kenneth Porter) Subject: Machine wants to reconfigure (was Sun 386i's) To: sun-386i@sc3d118mc.acq.osd.mil > 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. > ... > It even asks it when I try to boot in single user mode, so > there seems to be no way to around this reconfiguration. Check the beginning of /etc/rc.boot. Apparently netconfig(8C) is running with the belief that your system has been unconfigured(8). This could be because your /etc/net.conf got deleted. To get out of running netconfig, you must avoid running rc.boot. This can be done by booting(8S) with the -b flag, which gets passed to init(8). The -b flag tells init not to read the rc files. You will not have the /usr partition mounted at this point, and so may need to do it manually. I'd suggest a careful study of the boot process by reading the above manual pages and the rc files before proceeding. Ken (shiva@well.sf.ca.us) ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 18 Mar 91 16:57:17 +0000 From: Chris Clack Subject: Memory upgrade for Sun 3/50 To: Suns-at-Home@ecn.purdue.edu I want to upgrade my Sun 3/50. I'd like to get as much RAM as I can possibly squeeze into the poor little machine. How many different solutions are there to this problem and how much do they cost? --Chris. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 18 Mar 91 11:14:11 -0800 From: Greg Onufer Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V4 #9 To: Dwight D. McKay (The Moderator) Comer Duncan writes: >I am wondering what people who configure Suns-at-Home from SparcStations >such as SLC or SS1 are considering as minimum needed disk attached with >enough space to hold the OS AND have enough left to do 'useful work'? >Is the option of using a floppy to transport files back and forth from >home to work a really practical solution? The SLC can't have a floppy (unless it was a SCSI floppy--- but is that a workable option?). Yes, it probably would be useful unless you have a tape drive (which costs much more in both hardware and media). There are utilities to write across multiple floppies for moving large amounts of data (SunOS bar and dump, GNU tar). However, I personally do not entertain the idea of backing up a hard drive onto floppies! Even doing a SunOS install from floppies is tedious (I've done it for a 386i). For a full SunOS installation, I usually allocate about 160 Mb (including a /var partition and a swap partition). This includes some demos and OpenWindows. Add any space you need for 'useful' work. I am not aware of a color SLC. Is Sun now offering a color configuration now? Cheers!greg ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 18 Mar 91 13:41:54 -0800 From: swansonc@stolaf.edu Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V4 #9 To: gcd@einstein.bgsu.edu (Comer Duncan) >>>>> On Mon, 11 Mar 91 22:07:38 EST, >>>>> >>>>> gcd@einstein.bgsu.edu (Comer Duncan) wrote: [deletions] gcd> I am thinking of purchasing a Sparc for home sometime with color gcd> and need to know what the prevailing attitude is on disk space. gcd> Also, what happens when something breaks? I assume most of you gcd> guys can not afford Sun's prices for hardware support--I surely gcd> would not be able to... gcd> At my university we can get a SLC for about $2500. Adding color gcd> and disks would at least double the above figure... gcd> Comer Duncan Is it even possible to upgrade the SLC to color? I thought that it was pretty unexpandable. Either way, what would color SPARC cost me on an educational discount (or used - anybody got one they want to sell :) How about a color 3/60 or 3/80, anyone know what they would cost used or on ed. discount (I'm pretty sure the 3/60 is no longer carried by sun, but I'm not sure about the 3/80) Thank's in advance, -Chris Chris Swanson, Chem/CS/Pre-med Undergrad, St. Olaf College, Northfield,MN 55057 DDN: (CDS6) INTERNET: swansonc@acc.stolaf.edu UUCP: swansonc@stolaf AT&T: Work: (507)-645-6845 Home: (507)-663-6424 I would deny this reality, but that wouldn't pay the bills... ------------------------------ End of Suns-at-Home Digest ******************************