Date: Sat, 24 Feb 96 09:17:46 EST From: Dwight McKay (The Moderator) Reply-To: Suns-at-Home@net-kitchen.com Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V8 #7 To: Suns-at-Home-List Suns-at-Home Digest Sat, 24 Feb 96 Volume 9 : Issue 7 Today's Topics: Diskless booting floppy driver patch? Internal SCSI on 4/330? OS choice for home machine Solaris 2.4 patch for faster baud rates w/SLC 'zs' serial port? Solaris includes SunOS ... Sun 3/80 ? Suns-at-Home Digest V8 #5 (2 msgs) +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Submissions: suns-at-home \ | | Requests: suns-at-home-request > @net-kitchen.com | | Archives: suns-at-home-archives / | | WWW Archive access: http://www.net-kitchen.com/~sah | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 17 Feb 1996 12:00:50 -0800 (PST) From: Curt Sampson Subject: Diskless booting To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com > From: Alex Dumitru > Subject: Diskless booting > > Is anyone on this list booting a sun diskless from a FreeBSD box? If so > I would appreciate it if you could contact me with some details on your > particular setup. I'm booting a couple of Sun 3/50s running Xkernel from a NetBSD box without difficulty. Rather than go into all of the details here, probably the easiest thing for you to do is iether to get a copy of the NetBSD diskless(8) man page (from ftp.netbsd.org), or to get a copy of the Linux Xkernel distribution which has better documentation than the generic version, and follow the instructions there. You probably won't have to compile rarpd or bootparamd or anything like that, since you likely already have them. The short summary is: 1. Put the hostname in your DNS or /etc/hosts, the ethernet address and host name in /etc/ethers, and start rarpd -a. 2. Create a /tftpboot directory (or symlink it to your current /usr/tftp or whatever) and put the boot program in there (boot.sun3.sunos.4.1.1 or NetBSD's netboot-112). Symlink a file named for the hex IP address of the machine you want to boot to that (e.g., if the machine is 205.204.203.7 you need to symlink boot.sun3.sunos.4.1.1 to CDCCCB07). 3. Set up an appropriate entry in /etc/bootparams, along the lines of somehost.dom root=servver.dom:/export/root/somehost.root (You probably need a swap file too, if you're booting a full OS.) cjs - ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 17 Feb 1996 09:44:06 -0800 From: joshr@enternet.com (Josh Rabinowitz) Subject: floppy driver patch? To: dcase@case.com, webmaster@opus.com, Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com Hello Kind Sun Managers and others: I have an "Opus Personal Mainframe 5000" Sparc1+ clone running 4.1.3. I cannot get the floppy drive to work. I have heard that I need a patch to the OS for the Opus to use the floppy, but no one seems to know which one and I can't find it at sunsolve or from the Opus people. So I have 3 questions. I have a 4.1.4 cdrom, Does it have the patch I need for my 4.1.3 Opus system? If not, where should I acquire this patch, assuming Im not a sunsolve member? Does 4.1.4 solve this problem? I read the sun-managers FAQ on the issue of patches, but didn't see the info I was looking for. Thanks in advance, I will of course summarize. joshr@enternet.com Josh Rabinowitz - ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 24 Feb 1996 04:09:12 -0500 From: wkearney@access.digex.net (Bill Kearney) Subject: Internal SCSI on 4/330? To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com Is there an internal SCSI plug on a 4/330 motherboard? Or better yet, is that 50 pin connector labelled J2000 the internal SCSI? I know it's got external SCSI but I've stuffed this into a 12 slot cage and want to use the drives internally. The question is how does one do it? Thanks, Bill - ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 17 Feb 1996 19:53:54 -0600 (CST) From: Ty Sarna Subject: OS choice for home machine To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com In article <199602171357.IAA23475@tigger.net-kitchen.com>, "Anthony D'Atri" writes: > > >(even some compilable software... > >though that's the exception instead of the rule for > >stuff you get in source form...) > > Unless Net/FreeBSD are substantially different from BSDI, getting things > to build on it is likely to be a hassle sometimes. True, but not very often in my experience. Especially over time, as packages are ported to things like the Alpha (and get type problems ironed out) or other more POSIXy OSes. More and more things compile out of the box for NetBSD, too. Especially popular packages. It's not a big deal. > >>NetBSD is quite a bit > >>more modern, secure, and supported than S(t)unOS. > > SunOS is no less supported on the net than NetBSD. Given that you pretty much admit to not being very familiar with NetBSD, I don't see how you can make this claim. I suppose it depends on your definition of support, but for any reasonable definition of support including "currently being developed and enhanced", and "developers respond to and fix bugs" (and I don't just mean if you're paying lots for maintenance on legacy hardware. You can get support on PDP 11s still, but it's hard to say they're really "supported" in general. Besides, this is suns-at-home, where most people can't afford maintenance contracts), I don't think that's true. Further, the source is all availible, so it's very easy to fix things or figure out what's going on, and provide support yourself (which is often the best kind). Plus NetBSD supports a bunch of things (Multicast, multiple ip addresses per interface, clustering FFS, etc.) that are difficult or impossible to get support for on SunOS, especially on the sun3. NFS V3 was available for NetBSD before Solaris, I think :-) (though it's not integrated in the mainline tree yet). Finally, you can get IPng as a drop-in replacement for IPv4 in NetBSD. How do you get a IPng support for SunOS 4.1.x on a sun4? Etc. SunOS is still popular an supported, but it's not really "alive" at the same level as NetBSD. It is where it is, but it's not going much further. That's fine if you're compfortable there and it works well for you. I am, as I still run SunOS on my 3/60 (partly because the NetBSD/sun3 si driver is still apparently a bit flaky and partly because I intend to replace it with a NetBSD/i386 machine eventually anyway, so there's no reason to do much major work on it). But for many people, especially people who are IP-connected to the Net and need or want better security and compatibility with new net standards like multicast and eventually IPng, NetBSD is a better choice. And if you have an OS-less Sun and need something to run on it, NetBSD seems like a much better choice than shelling out for SunOS or Solaris. Especially since you can run static SunOS binaries on NetBSD out of the box, and if you have a SunOS license (or if your consscience will allow you to do without one), you can install the SunOS ld.so and libraries on NetBSD and run dynamicaly linked software too, inclduing virtually any commercial software you might have. > >>Of it is essentially > >>SunOS binary compatible too, so long as you load it up with a copy of > >>the SunOS shared libraries. > > I'd love to see a description of how this can work. Quite easily, actually. In fact the, NetBSD/sparc developers ran the NetBSD kernel with a SunOS userland for quite long while, until the kernel was sturdy enough so that the NetBSD userland could become self-hosting on the sparc. How does it work? 4.4BSD has a few facilities to allow execution of foreign (but primarily other Unix or Unix-like) operating systems. First, it's possible to set up multiple object file support. This isn't needed for SunOS emulation, since both SunOS and NetBSD/sparc use a.out. However, for things like the Linux binary compatibility support on NetBSD/i386, it can allow other object formats to be exec'd by the kernel, like ELF. The second feature is that instead of having a global system call table, it's referenced by a pointer in each processes' structure. When the a.out loader discoveres a SunOS magic number, it sets up the process with a pointer to the SunOS syscall table instead of the default NetBSD table. Some entries in the SunOS syscall table just point to the same function as the NetBSD table (probably _exit() and other simple things, for example). Others point to wrapper functions that call the equivalent NetBSD function after fiddling with the parameters (eg, changing IOCTL numbers, or rearranging structures, or translating SunOS 32 bit off_t types to 64 bit off_t on NetBSD). On return from the NetBSD call, the wrapper may also do some other cleanup, like rearrange returned structures to the expected SunOS format, translate off_t back, possibly remap errno values (some OSes use different values for the same error and thus need a translation table... I don't know offhand if SunOS is one), etc. Finally, for some OSes (SunOS being one) locore may need to be able to accept a different method of trapping syscalls into the kernel and getting the parameters, and may want to handle signal delivery differently if the process is a foreign SunOS process. The first two parts are machine-independant, the last must be added to each NetBSd port (which is why you can't run SunOS/sun386i binaries on NetBSD/i386 yet, because nobody's added the necessary stuff to the i386 locore) And there you go... SunOS static binaries run unchanged on NetBSD/sparc (or, SunOS sun3 binaries on any if the NetBSD m68k ports, including sun3, mac, hp300, etc). The NetBSD kernel just presents a SunOS virtual machine interface to SunOS processes when it detects one. It all works transparently, and you can mix and match formats. You can exec a SunOS program from a NetBSD one, or vice versa. The only programs that don't work are ones using kvm that depend on kernel internals, but this is pretty much limited to ps, top, and things of that ilk, virtually all of which exist for NetBSD anyway. Dynamic executables work too, you just need a copy of the SunOS ld.so and libraries for them to link with. Since SunOS dynamicly linked binaries are implenented in user space exculsively, no special support is even needed from the NetBSD kernel. Programs just mmap the SunOS ld.so, call it to link in the SunOS libraries, and go. Works great. To make things a bit easier, the wrappers for SunOS functions that take filenames use a utility function to look under /emul/sunos, before looking under /, so that any filenames that might conflict between OSes can be separated. Just create a /emul/sunos/lib and populate with ld.so and SunOS libraries, and everything just works. Other OS emulations on NetBSD use a similar method (/emul/svr4, etc). NetBSD supports a whole bunch of foreign unix binaries as long as the host and foreign CPU are the same architecture (ie, you can't run sun4 SunOS binaries on NetBSD/i386) Which NetBSD Emulation Ports supported Description ---------------------------------------------------------------------- COMPAT_NOMID most ports BSDI 1.x and ancient (0.8) NetBSD bins ? i386 (and sparc?) BSDI 2.x (no option needed, I think) COMPAT_FREEBSD i386 FreeBSD/i386 binaries on NetBSD COMPAT_HPUX hp300 (1) HPUX HP 300 and 400 binaries COMPAT_IBCS2 i386 Intel Binary Compatability Standard (SCO, Xenix 386(?), ISC Unix, etc) COMPAT_LINUX i386 (2) Linux a.out (and ELF with anothe option) COMPAT_OSF1 alpha OSF/1 (dymanicly linked binaries don't work yet) COMPAT_SUNOS sparc, most(all?) sun4 SunOS on sparc, sun3 SunOS on m68k's, m68k ports. in theory could allow SunOS/sun386i on NetBSD/i386 as well, but not implemented. COMPAT_SVR4 i386 (2) SVR4 COMPAT_ULTIRX pmax (2) DEC Ultrix on DECstations (1) could work on other m68k ports, but no locore support in them yet (2) Could in theory work for other CPU archiytectures too, like Linux/m68k on m68k NetBSDs, Amiga UNIX on m68k NetBSD, or Solaris (SunOS 5 if you'r picky) on NetBSD/sparc, VAX Ultrix on NetBSD/vax, etc., but again nobody's cared to implement it yet. - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 19 Feb 1996 06:46:55 GMT From: "David.Ashton-Reader" Subject: Solaris 2.4 atch for faster baud rates on a SPARC SLC 'zs' serial comms port? To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com Does anyone know where I can get a Solaris 2.4 patch for faster baud rates on a SPARC SLC 'zs' serial comms port? (The SLC has NO expansion options, so cannot replace 'zs') Thanx in advance, David :) - ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 17 Feb 96 15:15:45 PST From: lakin@pgc.com (Fred Lakin) Subject: Solaris includes SunOS ... To: suns-at-home@tigger.net-kitchen.com Date: Mon, 12 Feb 1996 10:21:27 -0800 (PST) From: "Anthony D'Atri" Subject: OS choice for home machine To: Suns-at-Home-List@tigger.net-kitchen.com >I find that where I want to >upgrade software packages for the SS2, that the newest >versions always support Solaris and sometimes aren't even >available for Sun OS Solaris *includes* SunOS. It is a superset, not a successor. Are you using superset in such a way as to imply that any software which runs under SunOS will also run under Solaris? That would be good news -- I thought I was stuck with SunOS in order to run Sun Common Lisp, which I bought from Sun back in 1990, along with support from first Sun and then Lucid when Sun gave it back to them. But Lucid went belly-up before they bothered to ship me the so-called "Solaris version". Are you saying I don't need a Solaris version, that the SunOS bins will run? Yes, I know that I could get a Solaris version of Lucid from Harlequin, but they won't honor my previous agreement with Lucid and so it will cost $3-5K. tnx, -f - ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 18 Feb 1996 15:02:43 -0600 (CST) From: Student Christian Fellowship Subject: Sun 3/80 ? To: Suns-at-Home-Request@tigger.net-kitchen.com Good Day: Recently, Motorola has donated a Sun 3/80 to our student organization. Unfortunately, we are unable to make use of this piece of hardware for the following reasons: 1) we have no documentation for the machine 2) when we attempt to bring the system up to the login prompt, the machine hangs when it begins looking for a NIS server on the network (it is not on a network any-longer) 3) we do not have the root passwords. Of the above three problems, number two is the critical problem. We should be able to get the root passwords from our Motorola contact on Monday, and he is already aware that we would appreciate the documentation for the hardware. So I am writing to you to learn of how to overcome problem number two. Our hardware configuration is the sun 3/80, monitor, and keyboard and mouse. Is there away to boot this machine in single user mode, without it believing that it is connected to a network, and if the abovew is not possible, what other routes would you suggest to us. Thank you for looking into this, and I am looking forward to hearing from you soon! James M. Thomas Student Christian Fellowship - ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 17 Feb 1996 16:26:14 +0100 From: rob@pooh.muc.de (rob j van den berg) Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V8 #5 To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com For the last year I have a SS-2 in my, rather small, office. I am quite happy with it, However: the thing makes a lot of noise. So my following question: Does anyone have any experience in silencing a SS2? TIA, rob - ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 24 Feb 1996 04:09:33 -0500 From: wkearney@access.digex.net (Bill Kearney) Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V8 #5 To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com Anyone know if it's possible to get an Archive Python 25501 4mm DAT to work with Solaris 2.4? I've got one and the IPC complains terribly about it at boot time. Might I have to change something on the unit to make it compatible? How about a web source of info on Archive for that matter. Thanks Bill - ------------------------------ End of Suns-at-Home Digest ******************************