Date: Sat, 23 Mar 96 20:24:19 EST From: Dwight McKay (The Moderator) Reply-To: Suns-at-Home@net-kitchen.com Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V9 #11 To: Suns-at-Home-List Suns-at-Home Digest Sat, 23 Mar 96 Volume 9 : Issue 11 Today's Topics: character set problem when booting 3/260 from tape Cycle 5 mother board upgrade Fans in rack-mounted Sun systems PPP2-2 too slow ??? serial port patches Sun 3/80 PPP Suns-at-Home Digest V9 #10 +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | 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: Sun, 17 Mar 1996 13:33:16 -0800 (PST) From: John Bainbridge Subject: character set problem when booting 3/260 from tape To: suns-at-home@tigger.net-kitchen.com I'm trying to (for the first time) boot a 3/260 from tape (4.1.1) with the intention of formatting it's HD and installing the OS. I'm using a PC as a monitor on serial port A. The ROM monitor comes up fine, everything checks out ok. At first booting off the tape goes fine, munix loads etc. The problem is that when it hits the part where it should 'ask you what you want to do, install the miniroot or go to a user shell' it switchs character sets (seemingly). A little experimentation has shown that it is 'asking' what do you want to do etc. and responding to the appropriate keystrokes, it has just all of a sudden changed most of the representations of the characters on the screen. I've tried changing the terminal type in terminal emulation software to all of the different types to no avail (the VT's, the WYSE's, ANSI etc). I've also checked out the EPROM settings and the monitor is set to serial A. Any ideas? Thanks, John Bainbridge - ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 23 Mar 1996 17:27:40 -0500 From: "Dwight D. McKay" Subject: Cycle 5 mother board upgrade To: suns-at-home The end of last week I upgraded my machine, tigger, from a SS1+ to a 110 mhz SPARC 5 clone from Cycle Computer. The Cycle 5 board is a drop-in replacement for the SS1, SS1+ and SS2 motherboard. It has all the same connectors in the same places and accepts the old sbus cards, disks and memory (with some limits). You need to reinstall the OS after upgrading as this board is a sun4m CPU not a sun4. You can see pictures of the board and complete installation directions on the Cycle Computer web site/(http://www.cyclecc.com/). They also make a board which replaces an IPC or IPX motherboard. The board is very clean, no ECO wires. It dropped in easily with a screw driver and a static strap being the only needed tools. The cycle board gives you a parallel port and brings the two serial ports out on a single connector, just like the SS5 does. My old two slot GX video board plugged in and worked without problems. The board does have an additional fan on it, but it does not seem to add noticeably to the sound level. As for memory, the story is this: The cycle 5 board accepts 30 pin SIMMs in two banks of eight same size, same speed SIMMs. I purchased an additional 4 4x9 SIMMs to fill out one bank when I bought the board. The other bank has 8 ancient 100ns 1x9 SIMMs giving a total of 40mb. The board offers a memory speed dip switch and a processor speed dip switch which can be used to cope with slow memory. The instructions which come with the board specifically mention 100ns 4x9s as a potential problem. My experience over the past week has been just one memory error using the factory default of maximum processor speed and minimum memory speed. That error occured shortly after I put the board in and since then, there have been no problems. Cycle 5 sells their product through resellers. I got mine from Mindy at Computer Aided Tools and Service in Indianapolis, IN. It took them about a week to get the board, memory and a Y-cable for the serial ports delivered directly to me. Mindy and the folks at CATS were friendly and helpful. Overall, I've very happy with the upgrade. The machine feels FAST. Wabi runs quick enough to not be annoying. If you are thinking of upgrading an original Sun "pizza box" machine take a look at this board. -- -- Dwight D. McKay - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 07:35:43 +1000 (EST) From: Craig in techmode Subject: Fans in rack-mounted Sun systems To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com There's been much discussion about fans in Sun rack-mounted systems, along with their associated noise, power consumption, cooling potential, etc. of late, so I figure I should add come comments about my experiences and experiments... I've been running a 3/480 rackmount machine since September last year, and as people will know the 501-1299/1550 Sun-3x CPU board in these machines draws a phenomenal ammount of power just on it's own (around 26 amps just off the +5 volt rail!). Add to this the power drawn by a wad of 501-1102 8 meg ECC RAM cards, along with a SCSI card and anything else, and that makes a considerable load.. The power supplies in these racks are normally rated at 925 watts, and for a good reason! The only real problem with this is heat.. Not only do all the cards generate copious ammounts of heat, but the power supply itself does too. In fact, in my rack here, the power supply makes a significant contribution to the heat output. And given the way the fan in the power supply blows air directly at a closed metal panel (where the filter sits), this is not good at all... So, what can be done with fans while still taking care to adequately cool the system? I originally whipped out the 6-fan tray from the bottom of the 12-slot chassis and built a 6-volt regulator circuit bolted to the metal of the tray so that all 6 fans ran on 6 volts rather than 12. This worked great until several days in December when the temps climbed way over 30 degrees C (I'm in Sydney, Australia, remember!), and two of my 4 -1102 ram boards fell over with serious heat stroke problems. The 'failure' was temporary, but next time the temp rose that high again, whammo!! One failed machine again. Obviously, despite the massive reduction in fan noise (I don't run any big drives - just a few 3.5" SCSI Quantums in a PC mini-tower case sitting where the giant Hitachi DK-815's should be), the airflow was too low, so I decided to replace the 6 volt regulator I'd bolted to the fan tray with a 9 volt one, and voila!! A machine that now works perfectly in even the most adverse Sydney weather conditions, and is far quieter than normal (fan-wise anyway) to boot. I also took the precaution to bolt another spare 12 volt fan above the top grille of the chassis which is in turn above the outlet of the power supply's fan, thereby reducing the latent heat being trapped in the metalwork (and heating up the power switch to finger-burning temps!). This fan also runs at 9 volts DC, but via a mains-powered plug-pack. In recent weeks I've been able to obtain (finally!) a pair of 501-1451 32 meg ECC ram boards, so they have replaced the 4 -1102's I was running, which has reduced the load on the power supply and therefore the heat output of the machine. Another aspect of cooling is to ensure that the airflow to the bottom of the chassis, where the fan tray lives, is not impeded in any way. I have a 19" rack shelf sitting about 150 mm below the bottom of the rack, and on this shelf sits a couple of modems. This arrangement has the dual benefits of providing a clear channel for air to be sucked into the bottom of the chassis, and also keeps the modems force-cooled! Regards, Craig. - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 00:49:32 -0800 (PST) From: Curt Sampson Subject: PPP2-2 too slow ??? To: "fadi (f.) mehanna" > From: "fadi (f.) mehanna" > > Starting an xterm from work takes almost two minutes. If you're running the xterm on your host at work, and having it connect to the server on your local machine across a modem link, this will be very slow. This is a problem with X, not with your system; X functions quite poorly over low bandwidth links. There is a low-bandwidth extension for X that might help alleviate this problem, but you'd probably have to recompile both your server and the clients you want to use to take advantage of it. (Or perhaps just the server and the shared libraries on the system running the client.) > I havn't benchmarked the speed, but I can tell it is very slow, > most ftp speeds are 1 - 2kbps ???? > ... > I am allready using bsdcomp and mtu 296 to try to speed up things ... I generally see speeds of 2900 cps or so. At 28.8 Kbps, you'll want a much higher MTU than 296; I use 1500. I'm not using bsdcomp; I don't even know what it is. If it's some sort of compression-on-the-fly utility, you may want to turn it off; the modem already does compression, and if your machine is low on CPU, this will slow things down, not speed things up. Also, make sure you've got your serial port speed set to 38400. You didn't mention what kind of system you're on; I gather that Sun 4s are not capable of this speed, and SunOS doesn't support more than 19200 without patches on a Sun 3. (I use NetBSD 1.1 on my 3/60, and a 38400 PPP connection runs just fine.) cjs - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 07:53:38 +1000 (EST) From: Craig in techmode Subject: serial port patches To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com > Date: Mon, 11 Mar 96 01:34:29 -0500 > From: Kevin Kim > Subject: serial port patches > To: Suns-at-Home-List@tigger.net-kitchen.com > > Hi, > > I'm trying to run a 28.8k modem off my sun 3/60 serial port. Now > I was told by someone else that they are running their serial ports > at 38.4k. I've never been able to set my ports to anything above 19.2k. > > It's been suggested that I need to install a patch to my OS (SunOS 4.1.1U1). > Anyone know what patch(es) I need to install? Ok, the patch you're thinking of is Sun's 'jumbo' serial driver patch, numbered 100513-xx. However, this is of little use for a Sun-3 machine as the important changes (relating to how interrupts from the SCC are handled, etc.) were, as far as I know, never implemented in the Sun-3/Sun-3x object modules for SunOS 4.1.1, which leaves us in a lurch. I tried installing this patch on my 3/60 at one stage, and the difference it made (if any) was not noticable under any conditions I could create. The only way to really improve serial port performance is to increase the CPU clock speed of your machine to 25 MHz. This speeds up your machine by around 25 percent, which helps with serial throughput. It does nothing to address the real problem (software driver issues), but it helps overcome it in a different way. >From what I've been reading on the Sun-3 NetBSD list of late, the serial drivers for NetBSD are capable of phenomenal data rates! This shows how much difference well-written device drivers can make.. Regards, Craig. - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 07:44:25 +1000 (EST) From: Craig in techmode Subject: Sun 3/80 PPP To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com > Date: Sat, 9 Mar 1996 20:00:49 -0500 (EST) > From: Mike Pepe > Subject: Sun 3/80 PPP > To: Dwight McKay > > Hi there. I'm wondering if there's anyone out there who has gotten PPP > running on a 3/80. I've been fooling with DP 4.0 but haven't had much > success, it seems far more complicated than it need be. I'm aware the > 3/80 serial ports are brain-damaged in some way, but I've gotten terminal > emulation software to work and I seem to be able to send and receive even > large files without any problem. > > The system is a 3/80, 16 megs RAM, 900 megs disk space, 150 meg tape > drive. Running SunOS 4.1.1U1, with X11R6 and gcc 2.6.2 Ok, to start with forget about using the DP package. It's too difficult to build and install, and excessively difficult to configure and use. I tried when I was first toying around with ideas for my permanent IP link, but dumped it when I found out about a better alternative... There is another public-domain PPP package around on lots of FTP sites which gives none of the hassles of DP. The version of the source I use here is called 'ppp-2.2.tar.gz'. I run this on my gateway machine, which is a 4/110 board in a 3/60 case by the way. It runs SunOS 4.1.4, but before the 4/110 arrived a few months ago I was running this package on a 3/60 board running SunOS 4.1.1 with no problems. Regards, Craig. - ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 Mar 1996 12:56:06 -0800 From: "James W. Birdsall" Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V9 #10 To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com >"fadi (f.) mehanna" writes: > >this is in regard to using ppp-2.2. >Is it my immagination, or ppp is too slow ??? >[...] >I havn't benchmarked the speed, but I can tell it is very slow, >most ftp speeds are 1 - 2kbps ???? Well, you've got a 28.8kbit modem. Divide by ten to get the rough maximum number of bytes per second: 2880. Compression may help depending on the file, but against that you have the overhead of packet headers and whatnot. I have a very similar setup and frankly 2400-2500 bytes per second is the best you're likely to get. >gregc@pm-tech.com (Greg Cronau) writes [re VME slot jumper settings]: > >for filled slots, the jumpers should be removed. No! Each board has specific requirements for the settings of those jumpers. Removing them both is common, but not universal. What you need to do is get a cardcage configuration chart that includes the boards in question (the settings seem to be the same for particular boards no matter what chassis they're in). The Sun Hardware Reference has a bunch in the flat-ASCII version (haven't HTMLized them yet). James W. Birdsall http://www.picarefy.com/~jwbirdsa/ jwbirdsa@picarefy.com "For it is the doom of men that they forget." -- Merlin Get the Sun Hardware Reference from ftp.picarefy.com:/pub/Sun-Hardware-Ref Sun Hardware Reference Web Page: http://sun-www.picarefy.com/ - ------------------------------ End of Suns-at-Home Digest ******************************