Date: Sat, 2 Mar 96 10:12:46 EST From: Dwight McKay (The Moderator) Reply-To: Suns-at-Home@net-kitchen.com Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V8 #8 To: Suns-at-Home-List Suns-at-Home Digest Sat, 2 Mar 96 Volume 9 : Issue 8 Today's Topics: Cheap/easy/good ways to connect IPC and MacClassic ? Internal SCSI on 4/330? Opus floppy, 4/330 SCSI, OS's OS choice for home machine (2 msgs) Solaris 2.4 ... faster baud rates ... SLC 'zs' serial comms port? (2 msgs) SS2 booting as standalone. Sun 3/80 Suns-at-Home Digest V8 #7 +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | 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: Tue, 27 Feb 1996 12:31:23 +0100 From: mtandle@sn.no Subject: Cheap/easy/good ways to connect IPC and MacClassic ? To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com Hello, I find myself with a Sun IPC and a Mac Classic standing side-by-side on my desk at home, and I am wondering what the easiest, cheapest, and/or best methods are for connecting these... Do I need to find an ethernet card for the Mac ? Are they pricey ? Are there other options ? Can I make the IPC talk localtalk ? The Mac has a HP DeskWriter that has a localtalk interface (I think). Can the printer be shared between the two computers, or be used by the IPC at all ? Are there sources of information (newsgroups, mailing lists, Web sites) that could give me some help on this ? TIA, -Morten - ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 1 Mar 1996 11:59:39 -0800 From: gary@ranchogrande.mce.com Subject: Internal SCSI on 4/330? To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com Bill, What you have is a 4/360.. A supported upgrade from Sun. They did it with a SCSI pass-thru board in slot 7. The part number was 501-1666. Basically, it what pieced together using the metal SCSI frame from a 3/280 which has the external 50 Pin SCSI connector combined with the Backplane pcb (270-1059) from the 3/260 which connects to the VME P2. If you still have a SCSI frame from a 3/260 or 4/260, you can remove the controller from the frame and plug a 50 Pin ribbon cable onto the 50 pin header inside and bring it out tho a DB50. - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 Feb 1996 09:58:03 -0800 (PST) From: "Anthony D'Atri" Subject: Opus floppy, 4/330 SCSI, OS's To: Suns-at-Home-List@tigger.net-kitchen.com >I have heard that I need a patch to the OS for the Opus >to use the floppy When last I used their machines (4.1.1), one needed a different kernel module because they decided to use a different controller chip. Their module was supposed to handle the Sun-style chip, too. Alas, I'm several jobs away from the machines and can't supply you with a copy. Also beware that you'll get the wrong hostid when using a Sun kernel. ------- >Is there an internal SCSI plug on a 4/330 motherboard? I believe the SCSI signals come through the VME connectors and out of the back of the backplane. >> 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. Well, let's see. This was written to a mailing list intended for Suns. I count twelve newsgroups related to Suns, two of which are gatewayed from other mailing lists. These groups on one of my news machines have had ~1000 articles in the last week or so. If one assumes that most people who are running Suns aren't running a 3rd-party OS, it would seem that there is indeed plenty of people on the net discussing SunOS. >but for any >reasonable definition of support including "currently being developed >and enhanced", and "developers respond to and fix bugs" We're geting more and more distant from the purpose of this list, but given the volunteer status of NetBSD, and from what I can see, development and enhancement is pretty slow. I'm not saying that NetBSD is a bad system; I'm just saying that it's not startlingly better than SunOS, which has never stopped being developed and enhanced. I got 5.5 shipped to me recently. >Plus NetBSD supports a bunch of things (Multicast <=>olympus<=>netstat -r ... BASE-ADDRESS.MCAST.NET olympus U 3 0 le0 <=>olympus<=>uname SunOS >multiple ip addresses per interface I've seen the procedure for this documented in at least one FAQ. >clustering FFS I don't know if Sun's done that yet or not. Has NetBSD implemented a clean bit on filesystems so that I don't have to wait for fsck when I reboot? >that are difficult or impossible to get support for on SunOS Installation is pretty easy, actually. >especially on the sun3 For the Sun3, granted, since SunOS development there stopped a while back. >NFS V3 was available for NetBSD before Solaris, I think :-) Perhaps, but is that very meaningful yet? I've seen lots of people having problems with V3, and explicitly forcing their mounts to V2. >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? How do you get it for BSD4.1a on a VAX 11/730? >SunOS is still popular an supported, but it's not really "alive" at the >same level as NetBSD. Huh? Just what OS do you think Sun's developing now? OS/9? >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 If they've got Sun3's, perhaps. It's not as clear with Sun4's. >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 I'm skeptical that many people who run Suns at home pay for duplicate licenses. >This isn't needed >for SunOS emulation, since both SunOS and NetBSD/sparc use a.out. Uh, no. SunOS 4 uses a.out. SunOS 5 uses ELF. ---------- >> 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? *BY DEFINITION*!!!!! SOLARIS IS NOT AN OS!!!!!! - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 Feb 1996 08:41:00 -0700 From: troycamp@fedex.com (Troy Campbell) Subject: OS choice for home machine To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com Just a few questions about NetBSD: I have a Sun 4/110 at home and its slow booting and bringing up the window system, which is an issue since I don't leave my machine up. Does NetBSD boot quickly? What is its windowing system? Does it support PPP? How about troff with a HP laserjet printer? Can I fit the whole thing (source/bin) on a 1 gig disk? Is it easy to install? What's the diff between it and say Linux which seems to be popular? Will I be able to use the full capacity of my 28800 modem or that a hardware limitation? >From a net illiterate, Troy - ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 27 Feb 1996 17:58:05 -0800 (PST) From: Curt Sampson Subject: OS choice for home machine To: Suns-at-Home-List@tigger.net-kitchen.com > Date: Sat, 17 Feb 1996 19:53:54 -0600 (CST) > From: Ty Sarna > > ...as I still run SunOS on my 3/60 (partly because the > NetBSD/sun3 si driver is still apparently a bit flaky... Actually, it's only flakey on 3/50s, due to a DMA bug. Some very recent kernel builds have come out that may have fixed this problem; results from testers are positive so far. I'm using a Sun 3/60 with a 500 MB SCSI drive, 24 MB of RAM, and a cgfour, and I'm pretty pleased with it. It's a bit on the slow side, and the scrolling is a bit painful (I'd really like to have a cgsix), but other than that it's a fine machine, and it cost me what just the colour monitor would have cost me had I been buying a new i386 system. I too would be interested in ways of making the thing quieter, though. The fan is quite noisy. I'm contemplating replacing it, but I need to make sure that my cooling power is not reduced, given all that RAM in the system. cjs - ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 27 Feb 1996 20:57:15 +0100 From: Thomas Tornblom Subject: Solaris 2.4 atch for faster baud rates on a SPARC SLC 'zs' serial comms port? To: dar@etude.demon.co.uk BTW, the SLC really do have expansion options. There are SCSI based port servers that runs up to at least 115.2kbps reliably. Check out the Central Datas line of servers, http://www.cd.com/ Thomas - ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 27 Feb 1996 16:10:44 +0100 From: Thomas Tornblom Subject: Solaris 2.4 atch for faster baud rates on a SPARC SLC 'zs' serial comms port? To: dar@etude.demon.co.uk > Date: Tue, 27 Feb 1996 13:28:15 GMT > From: "David.Ashton-Reader" > Cc: Suns-at-Home@net-kitchen.com > X-Sun-Charset: US-ASCII > > Hi Thomas, thanx for replying: > > > > 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 :) > > > > I recommend upgrading to Solaris 2.5. It handles the zs ports up to > > 76.8 (not reliably though), and it seems SunSoft finally has fixed > > rts/cts flowcontrol. > > > > If upgrading is not an option, you can modify one of the available > > speeds into 76.8 kbps, or 51.2kbps, which is a pretty useless speed. > > > > There is a table of shorts, zs_speeds, that contains the divisor > > values for the Zilog 8530. It is indexed with the speed index, 14 = > > 9600, 15 = 38400 etc. Replacing one of the shorts with a 0 modifies > > the corresponding speed to 76.8kbs. Don't replace 4800 or your mouse > > will be unusable! > > Ah - well Solaris 2.5 is not really an option for me (I have not got it) > > But I have obtained and installed the rts/cts flowcontrol patch for 2.4 > > So looking at this 'zs_speeds' possibility, I find that there are also > some other shorts that look of interest - 'zsticks' and 'zsdelay' (as > well as 'zslowat' and 'zshiwat' which are there after the rts/cts patch) > > They go like this (ignoring zslowat and zshiwat): > > BAUD 50 75 110 134 150 200 300 > zs_speeds: 0 3070 2046 1394 1144 1022 766 510 zsticks: 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 > zsdelay: 0 49 33 22 18 17 13 9 > > BAUD 600 1200 1800 2400 4800 9600 19200 38400 > zs_speeds: 254 126 83 62 30 14 6 2 > zsticks: 3 3 3 3 3 3 2 1 > zsdelay: 5 3 2 2 1 1 1 1 > > The relationship between these numbers seems to be something like: > > If you calculate BAUD * (1 + zsticks) / zs_speeds it is approx constant, e.g. > it is 50*3070/(1+3)=38375 for BAUD=50, 38400*2/(1+1)=38400 for BAUD=38400 > > So does that mean that zs_speeds=2 with zsticks=2 will give BAUD=57600 ? > (and, in theory, zs_speeds=1 with zsticks=2 will give BAUD=115200) > > i.e. is BAUD = 38400 * (1 + zsticks) / zs_speeds ? > > But I have not been able to guess how the 'zsdelay' values fit in here. > > I guess one might try zsdelay=1 with these values (for BAUD=57600) and > set zslowat=1 (it is 1 for 2400 to 38400 BAUD) and zshiwat=7(ish) (it is > 11 for 50 to 2400 BAUD, 9 for 9600 and 19200 BAUD, but 8 for 38400 BAUD) > ___________ > > Has anyone tried anything like this, or do you know what the formula is? > (i.e. how zsdelay fits in, and how do zslowat and zshiwat watermarks work) > > Are there similar data within 2.5's /dev/ksys that will help us 2.4ers? > > Cheers, David :-) The 8530 cannot physically generate 57.6 kbps with the oscillator sun uses, 4.9152MHz. The formula to calculate the zs_speeds entry is: (osc/16/2/baudrate) - 2 this gives that a divisor of 2 -> 38400 1 -> 51200 0 -> 76800 The zsdelay and zsticks are probably something used to calculate how often the interrupt queue should be flushed. The never versions of the zs driver (patched 2.4 and stock 2.5) loops in the interrupt handler to try to grab more than one character per interrupt. This is essential when running at higher speeds. The zslowat and zshiwat are probably used for flowcontrol, i.e. when input should be stopped with rts/cts or xon/xoff (hiwater) and resumed (lowater). Thomas - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 Feb 1996 11:02:00 -0500 From: "fadi (f.) mehanna" Subject: SS2 booting as standalone. To: scf@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu Hi there, I have a workable solution for you. Regarding problem 2, one way to fool the Sun 3/80 to think it is on a network, is by connecting an Ethernet transceiver to its Ethernet card terminated by a T 50 ohm resistors. This way the Sun will think it is on a network (a very small one), and will function as it is on a network (ie TCP/IP). The other thing you have to do is to disable NIS. If you ever forget the root passwd, you can boot the Sun in single user mode. Once you type the "Stop" & "A" buttons type "b -s", that will put you in single user mdoe with root privileges. I use this method on my SS2 and have no probelms. Hope this helps, BTW if you get other solutions please send them to Sun-at-Home - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 Feb 1996 12:18:39 -0800 (PST) From: "Jim Murff, NIS" Subject: Sun 3/80 To: scf@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu Hi; >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) There are several ways to overcome this. First you can 'boot -s' from the boot prom to get into a single user node. I am unsure of the old 3/80's bootprom syntax however, so you may need someone with that model to give the exact syntax. From single user you can easily get rid of NIS. - mv /var/yp /var/yp.bak - mv /etc/defaultdomain /etc/defaultdomain.sav - echo "noname" > /etc/defaultdomain. - reboot. NIS should be gone now. The problems might still be with NFS and automounter looking for disks that don't exist anymore. You might be better off just re-installing the OS and setting things up the way you want from scratch. Need more info to help you for sure(like disk space, memory, peripherals) >3) we do not have the root passwords. This one is similar to above. Assuming no one has made the console secure so you need the root password for single user mode, you can use vi in single user and remove the root passwd. If the console is secure you can boot off cdrom or tape and backdoor the system. -Jim - ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 24 Feb 1996 11:20:11 -0500 (EST) From: dlr Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V8 #7 To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com |From: rob@pooh.muc.de (rob j van den berg) | |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? I noticed the same thing with the one i have at home. My solution was to put it into a cabinet next to my desk. It required cutting a hole in the cabinet for the cables but the decrease in the noise level was worth it. I also put in a fan to circulate the air in the cabinet. I was worried about overheating for a while (but it has been there about 5-6months and hasn't melted yet. Anyone know about the specs on these machines heating up? cheers, dave - ------------------------------ End of Suns-at-Home Digest ******************************