Date: Mon, 31 Oct 94 09:16:40 EST From: Dwight McKay (The Moderator) Reply-To: Suns-at-Home@harbor.ecn.purdue.edu Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V7 #36 To: Suns-at-Home-List Suns-at-Home Digest Mon, 31 Oct 94 Volume 7 : Issue 36 Today's Topics: 3/60 cabling and termination Cheap source for archive 4320 ? Duplicating boot (or any) tape Help me with my new sun! IP[CX]/L[CX] lookalike SCSI enclosure ? PC-NFS vs. Beam and Whitesides Serial Port Options Suns-at-Home Digest V7 #35 (2 msgs) X11R6 +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Submissions: suns-at-home \ @harbor.ecn.purdue.edu | | Requests: suns-at-home-request > -- or -- | | Archives: suns-at-home-archives / ...rutgers!pur-ee!... | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 24 Oct 1994 23:50:59 -0700 (PDT) From: David Di Gioia Subject: 3/60 cabling and termination To: suns_at_home From: brennan@unity.ncsu.edu > I recently acquired a Sun 3/60. It's got 50-pin SCSI cabling but no > terminator. It's not the centronix type. This thing has 50 little pins! > I think from what I've seen those are called either SCSI-2 or DB50. Is > this right? We usually call it SCSI-1 or DB50. SCSI-2 is the small, hi-density micro-D like what's on the back of a SparcStation. > I tried to find a terminator around campus to borrow to see if the > system even works but no luck. If the bus (cabling, number of devices) is short enough, you may be able to get it working (at least for testing purposes) without a terminator. You might also be able to find the correct resistor packs for the last drive on the chain (which would be passive, internal termination). This should be a lot cheaper than an external terminator. I believe the 3/50 and/or 3/60 systems need to have a special cable for one of the external cables you use. It is missing pin 26, which would normally supply the termination power to the external terminator. This implies to me that your last external device will either have internal terminators, or be jumpered to provide power to an external terminator (since the SCSI cable won't be providing it). > And can anyone tell me what kind I need (passive/active)? Passive will work fine for Sun 3's and SparcStation 1 and SLC. Active is often better for systems that are newer than that, since they support synchronous SCSI. ...David Di Gioia | wu2@cts.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 24 Oct 94 21:41:17 MET From: Toerless Eckert Subject: Cheap source for archive 4320 ? To: suns-at-home@ecn.purdue.edu Hi Can somebody point me to a cheap source foe archive 4520 or 4320 DAT streamer drives ? The european market is nearly monopolized by HP and thus it is difficult to get them over here at reasonable prices. I've got a colleague in the usa who could ship the drive over to me. (I need these DAT because they're the only one that can do audio). Thanks ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 28 Oct 94 19:10:31 MST From: castalia@pirl.lpl.arizona.edu (Bradford Castalia) Subject: Duplicating boot (or any) tape To: Suns-at-Home@ecn.purdue.edu When duplicating a tape (including a boot tape - there's nothing inherently special about a boot tape) I use a script with a file copy loop (just like Bennett Todd presented in a recent posting), but I employ dd instead of cat. By setting the block size (ibs when reading the tape, obs when writing) to a value at least as large as the largest block on the tape all blocks will be read and written at their correct size. When the tape files are read in from the tape by dd the actual size of the current block is the amount of data available from the read, and that is the size of the data block written to the file. Thus when the files are written back out to a tape the same process occurs - the size of the data blocks written to tape will match the size of the blocks that were stored on disk. So how does one determine what the largest block size on the tape is? The easiest way is to just guess at some large number (like 100000). Another way is to make a tape map that shows the data block (record) structure for all files on the tape. This is easy (I can provide a tape_map program to anyone who requests it), and will provide the total number of files on the tape as well as ensuring the readability of the files. Bradford Castalia castalia@pirl.lpl.arizona.edu ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 24 Oct 94 21:28:48 MET From: Toerless Eckert Subject: Help me with my new sun! To: suns-at-home@ecn.purdue.edu, joshua@lclark.edu > I am a novice sun operator (a unit kinda fell in my lap) and I need > some of the pieces that didn't come on my 4/110. > > 1st) What are the specs on a 4/110? Processor, etc. Ah, glad you asked, i'm just through with my 3rd 4/110. Best sun@home if you don't need ISDN, audio, sbus and all this other nifty new stuff. Memory interface: The 4/110 is the first Sparc workstation from sun. The first Sparc was the 4/280 which hit the market 6 month before. The 4/110 uses a 14.3 Mhz clocked fujitsu Sparc processor. The memory interface does not use a first level cache but relies completely on column address cached bank switching. This was a very neat idea but it was also the reason for keeping the clockrate this low. In terms of performance this means that for pure CPU cycles the 4/110 is about 20% slower than a sparcstation 1, but the memory interface is much faster. double word memory transfers will be as fast as 10MB/sec, whereas a sparcstation 1 will never be faster than 4MB/sec. This has also a very positive effect on context switching. Memory chips: If you want to extend the memory of a 4/110, you can use either 256KB or 1MB simms, but you'll always need to fill a whole bank of eight at a time, or even more. The supported configurations are described in the 4/110 manual or in the field service engineering manual from sun. Sun will try to sell you Static Column DRam (SC-DRAM) for the 4/110 which by now is unacceptable expensive. This is in principle necessary due to the above explained memory architecture. In effect normal page mode DRAM will work as well. This has been stated by the 4/110 engineers in a very good article on the 4/110 architecture in one 1988 article in "Sun Technology" (gee, those were the days, what bull*** kinda information do we get today from sun ?). Bus: The 4/110 motherboard, being the first packed with graphics and memory was so filled up that sun didn't manage to give it a complete vme bus interface. The bme bus interface is a master-only interface. This means that bus-master DMA vme bus cards will not work in a 4/110 because they try to directly read/write to the 4/110 onboard memory, which means a slave-mode access to the memory on the 4/110 motherboard, something which is not supportet. Most 4/110 i've seen were used together with a MCP/ALM2 interface board which is a pure slave-mode VME device and provides 2 x parallel + 16 x serial interface, 4 of which have full synchornuous support with speed up to 512 kbps. If you find one of those boards you've got a better mailbox computer than most of the current suns. fpu: The fpu on the 4/110 is either none (i've been told those configs were sold in the usa, though i've never seen one), or with he old cg87 fpu, which didn't support the sqrt and .. (forgot it) instruction. This normally isn't of any problem because these instructions are trapped in the kernel. There are some foul compiler though that check the fpu first and exit the compiled program if they find a cg87 (i.e.: only a problem if you get a binary compiled with such a compiler on a newer sun). mouse/keyboard: Originally the sun 4/110 was sold with a type-3 keyboard and a type 3 mouse (or type 2). You can connect any newer sun type keyboard and mouse to it though, if you don't like the type 3 keyboard. Everything else: The 4/110 motherboard contains the usual mix of i/o devices delivered at those days. it got and auto-switching AUI and thin ethernet, 4 serial interfaces (A/B and mouse/keyboard) connected to 2 x 8530, which you can use for either asynchronuous or synchronuous communications (X.25 for example). The SCSI interface seems to be a little bit in advance of the actual technology, at least it is called "sw" (scsi weired), and it is only asynchronuous up to 1.9 MB/sec transfer rate. Works fine though, i got a throughput of nearly 1.8MB with my 1GB harddisk. The 4/110 has got one slot for a P4 graphics board. This is the same type of graphic slot provided with the Sun 3/60, 3/80, 4300, 4400 and probably some 3x00 server motherboards. The supported interfaces are the bw2 black and white interface, the cg4 color interface and the cgsix (GX) color graphics interface. I personally have got but a cgsixa and a cg4 interface, and each has got an advantage: the cg4 has got two planes, a b&w and a 8 bit color plane. X11 will neatly switch between them and no redraw is needed. The color on the cg4 is very slow though. The cgsix has got fast color graphics but only one display plane. Applications such as framemaker are actually more faster on the bw2 black & white plane of a cgfour. Software: The 4/110 is a real sun4 - No bloody "c,m,d or e". This means that under SunOS 4.1.X it shares some of the relics of this kernel architecture. The most annoying part is the old scsi architecture, i.e.: with sun4 machines all sun drivers are in /sys/sundev/*, whereas for sun4[cm] the drivers are in /sys/scsi and they are somewhat better. Try to connect an ARCHIVE DAT to a 4/110 for example, it's fun (i'll tell the solution when you need it). Also neat utilities like scsiping or scsiinfo won't work on sun4. Other than that i havn't run through any major problems though. It's only good to remember that a 4/110 most often behaves like a sun server and not like a workstation if it comes to software. > 2nd) Where can I get a newer version of SunOS? (The thing came with > v4.0 on it, and I haven't found a source yet that wants to compile > on it. I'd like 4.1.1 at least, but I probably don't want to fork > over the $$ for the latest SunOS5/Solaris version directly from sun) You will want to get SunOS 4.1.3_U1 which is the newest BSD based SunOS release. _U1 means that approximately 20.000 bugs have been fixed in this release since 4.1.3. Now there are only 10.00 bugs left i guess. You should be able to get a licence and media (CD) for about < $300, or find some friendly person to lend you a CD. You surely do not want solaris unless you have a Gnu FPU (cg89) in you're 4/110 which is very seldom, as the Solaris 2.x OS does not support the old FPU normally sold with the 4/110 anymore. The old FPU has a couple of bugs and SunOS 4.1.X contains a lot of workaround for it (i assume the compiler too, but i've never seen source of that). > 3rd) Where can I get good documentation on how to administer a system like > this. I'm a pretty solid unix -user- but I know little about TCP/IP, > the /dev directory, and configuation issues like how to set up > modem connections, ETC. Go to the next university and become student administrator for some years. best way to learn your way around suns. Honestly: no idea how to do it the hard way. Never tried. Best regards Toerless ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 24 Oct 94 20:50:37 MET From: Toerless Eckert Subject: IP[CX]/L[CX] lookalike SCSI enclosure ? To: suns-at-home@ecn.purdue.edu Hi Can someone recoomend me a company where i can get an enclosure for 1 FH external 5 1/4" SCSI drive or 2 * 5 1/4" HH SCSI drives ? I am looking for an enclosure that has the same size as the sparcstation IPC/IPC/LC/LX so that it will fit neatly to it. All the enclosures i've found so far are either at least one centimeter more wide or smaller and always higher and most times deeper. Sun itself doesn's seem to sell these enclosure empty, but they do have the exact enclosure for their external 8mm exabyte for example. If you buy that enclosure as spare parts it costs you well 800$ (*grin*). Well, any help welcome. I admit that i usually don't look for a neat fit with computer enclosures but with this neat little LX i got lately for private use i'd just very much like to keep the extension boxes in line with the main unit. Thanks ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 26 Oct 94 12:05:42 EDT From: gary@sabot.com (Gary Sabot) Subject: PC-NFS vs. Beam and Whitesides To: suns-at-home@ecn.purdue.edu I want to network a PC with my Sun, and am looking for recommendations for PC network software. I need NFS support, and I need it to be DOS based so it will be compatible with Desqview/X (Softwindows is too slow for what I want to do). 1. Does anyone know if PC-NFS includes support for the PC acting as an NFS-server as well as an NFS client? Does it include PC versions of dump/restore, or at least tar, that can use a tape drive on another machine on the network? 2. Also, does anyone have any experience with Beam and Whitesides network package, which does support NFS serving? 3. Lastly, any experiences, good or bad, with Desqview/X? It seems pretty ideal; you get to run windows applications from your Sun, but the run at PC hardware speed. --gary ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 28 Oct 1994 19:29:35 -0700 (PDT) From: dlr@netcom.com (dlr) Subject: Serial Port Options To: suns-at-home@ecn.purdue.edu I have just aquired a sparc2 and am in the process of setting it up on the neck. Before purchasing it I wasn't aware of the serial port limitations. Since then I have begun reseraching options for this. Looks like for me I may go with an sbus card to convert an sbus into two serial ports (each at 115.2). Here is my collection of replies thus far to my posting a query on netnews about this subject. This was brought up a little while back on this list and no one had responded thus far. With the advent of faster modems it is becoming more and more relevant. [David's collection of serial port information is about 32k in length. I've] [put a complete copy of it on the archive server. It's worth getting if you] [need fast serial ports. ] [To request a copy, send a message to: suns-at-home-qrchives@ecn.purdue.edu] [Put a line in the body of the message which reads: ] [ send VENDOR serial-ports --ed] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 24 Oct 94 21:12:41 PDT From: woolsey@jlw.com (Jeff Woolsey) Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V7 #35 To: Suns-at-Home@ecn.purdue.edu > > Date: Tue, 18 Oct 94 21:44:12 BST > From: David Allan Finch - home > Subject: free PPP with PSI's Interramp? > To: suns-at-home@ecn.purdue.edu > If you gave access to a Sun4 use dp-2.3 it is marganly easy to > install and has the added benifit of autodial. dp-2.3 works just find on a Sun3, also. 4.1.1 and loadable modules. > dp-2.3 & ppp-sunos4.1.pl6 can be got from ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Oct 1994 19:30:21 +1596657 (MET) From: Wilko Bulte Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V7 #35 To: Suns-at-Home@ecn.purdue.edu > Date: Sun, 23 Oct 1994 15:37:10 -0400 (EDT) > From: brennan@unity.ncsu.edu > Subject: New Sun User > To: suns-at-home@ecn.purdue.edu > > I recently acquired a Sun 3/60. It's got 50-pin SCSI cabling but > no terminator. It's not the centronix type. This thing has 50 little pins! > I think from what I've seen those are called either SCSI-2 or DB50. Is Correct, it is a SCSI interface. > this right? I tried to find a terminator around campus to borrow to see if > the system even works but no luck. Before I buy one does anyone know where Your system will work without one. The idea is to have a terminator at the end of the cable when you use external SCSI devices (tape, disk, whatever). > I can get one cheap? A catalog I have lists them as; passive/$60 or > active/$100. And can anyone tell me what kind I need (passive/active)? I Passive should be fine. I don't know about you handling a soldering iron, but I'd build it myself. It isn't much more than a connector plug and a few resistor networks. Should be say $10 or so max. Alternatively, you can put the terminator on the last SCSI device on the cable, and forget about any fancy external terminators. > tried calling the Sun support number and the guy told me I could buy the > answer at $150/hr. I gave him my best 4-letter word for free. Tsss, how unfriendly ;-) ;-) > Martin J Brennan > NCSU Physics Dept. > brennan@ncsu.edu If you need more info, just send me mail. Wilko ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Oct 94 9:17:12 GMT From: Mike Tuffs Subject: X11R6 To: Suns-at-Home@ecn.purdue.edu Hi, having read the posting concerning X11R6 on Sun 3/xx, I would like to say that I too am currently having problems getting things to link with the X11R6 libs. I get ld segv when I try to install, or complile things like xeyes. Is this likely to be the version of gcc (to be checked), or some incompatabilities with the various libs? I plan to look into this more closely this week, (whilst I still have enough disk space), so any pointers would be helpful. cheers, mike ------------------------------ End of Suns-at-Home Digest ******************************