Date: Sat, 13 Apr 96 06:48:46 EST From: Dwight McKay (The Moderator) Reply-To: Suns-at-Home@net-kitchen.com Subject: Suns-at-Home Digest V9 #14 To: Suns-at-Home-List Suns-at-Home Digest Sat, 13 Apr 96 Volume 9 : Issue 14 Today's Topics: BAD TRAP on 4/110 Cycle 5 boards dp-4.0, Sunos-4.1.3, jumbo tty patch -- Eureka! (2 msgs) QuickDraw printer from Solaris 2.4 SCSI ID questions VME cards for high speed serial ports. +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | 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, 6 Apr 96 21:36 EST From: Mike Frisch Subject: BAD TRAP on 4/110 To: sah@tigger.net-kitchen.com I am currently running a Sun 4/110 with SunOS 4.1.3_U1 installed. As of late, the machine has been giving me "BAD TRAP" problems and the system restarts. It's very intermittent and the machine will go for weeks without a problem then suddenly it'll happen twice in one day. I have a good idea that it's bad RAM, but I want to be sure before I go and spend the money on new RAM (currently has 8MB installed in 32 x 256k SIMMs). Can anybody offer any assistance? I have just purchased an IPC for use at home, but would like to keep the 4/110 running until I can make the change over. I'd also like to sell this machine (email offers if interested) in the near future to partially pay for my IPC, so I want to be sure it's in top working condition before I sell it. Thanks. Mike. - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 10:15:31 -0700 (PDT) From: Curt Sampson Subject: Cycle 5 boards To: "Anthony D'Atri" > From: "Anthony D'Atri" > > >but you just can't get around > >the fact that there are now workstation-class PCs > > I'm not so convinced of that. Current PC keyboards I find pretty > unusable, and one has to work hard to get a decent number of pixels on a > decent monitor at a decent refresh rate. I do agree that the keyboards are a bit nasty, although they're not hard to reprogram to something more reasonable (i.e., with the control and ESC keys where God meant them to be) under most Unix systems, especially if you're running X. However, I've never found displays to be a problem. My ATI Graphics Pro card (Mach 32, 2MB VRAM, PCI, cost me $200) is getting on two generations old, and I've been running 1152x900 in 256 colours at 68 Hz on it for ages. As a matter of fact, on this old Hitachi 19" monitor I have, the display is indistinguishable from my 3/60, except that it's a *lot* faster. Now, I know that workstations have improved a lot since the 3/60, but then again, so have PC graphics cards. Some of the new Intergraph `workstations' I was looking at a year ago were PCs running Windows NT with 1600x1200 in 65536 colours on a 27" monitor, and the display was as nice as any SGI I've seen. And again, the advantage of cheapness comes in here. A very good, very fast PCI graphics card is perhaps $400-$500. If you can live with a 17" monitor, you can pay well under $1000 for a monitor as good as can be gotten. (The Sony 17se monitors may be a tad over, but having done some rather close comparisons I can say that Viewsonic makes one for well under $1K that is practically its equal.) If you can get by with a fairly moderate amount of computing power, a PC will do just fine and will be considerably cheaper than a workstation of the same calibre. If you need serious computing power, of course, an Alpha will walk all over any PC out there. But how many people really need that? I get by just fine on a 486-100. Heck, at home I even struggle by on a 3/60. :-) cjs - ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 10 Apr 1996 10:25:04 -0400 From: ron@mlfarm.com (Ronald Florence) Subject: dp-4.0, Sunos-4.1.3, jumbo tty patch -- Eureka! To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com, dplist@acn.purdue.edu Sometimes the obvious takes a little longer to see... I've been struggling to get dp-4.0 to work with Sunos-4.1.3 and the jumbo tty patch. Dp-4.0 worked fine with an unpatched Sunos-4.1.3 kernel. With the patched kernel dp-4.0 would punt at the beginning of the dialscript, with `getc returned EOF'. I tried four versions of the jumbo tty patch: 100513-04, 100513-05, an undocumented zs_async.o from an obscure Scandanavian archive, and 100513-04 with Brian Katzung's binary patch. All worked with tip and uucp and broke on dp-4.0. I tried fiddling with the eeprom settings and modem configuration, checked the cable with a continuity tester and with a daemon that would monitor the rs-232 signals. Zip. The clue came when I got the patched kernel to break on a fax daemon that resets the modem by toggling DTR with a BIC and BIS of the modem control bits. Hmmm. The first line in the dp-4.0 modem script for Telebit modems is `AT Z', modem reset. Reset on a Telebit Worldblazer is a little like the Big Bang: the modem not only reconfigures itself from the settings in non-volatile memory, but also cycles the rs-232 lines. The async driver in the unpatched Sunos-4.1.3 kernel was tolerant enough of rs-232 signals to ignore it; the kernel with the jumbo tty patch is sensitive enough to see EOF when the modem recycles. The fix is trivial: I changed the `AT Z' wakeups in the dialscript to `AT'. For the fax daemon I'll probably substitute a similar wakeup string for the BIC/BIS toggle of DTR. I hope this information is useful to others who are trying dp-4.0 with Sunos-4.1.x and the jumbo tty patch. -- Ronald Florence - ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 10 Apr 1996 16:25:32 -0700 From: Greg Earle Subject: dp-4.0, Sunos-4.1.3, jumbo tty patch -- Eureka! To: ron@mlfarm.com > The clue came when I got the patched kernel to break on a fax daemon > that resets the modem by toggling DTR with a BIC and BIS of the modem > control bits. Hmmm. The first line in the dp-4.0 modem script for > Telebit modems is `AT Z', modem reset. Reset on a Telebit Worldblazer > is a little like the Big Bang: the modem not only reconfigures itself > from the settings in non-volatile memory, but also cycles the rs-232 > lines. The async driver in the unpatched Sunos-4.1.3 kernel was > tolerant enough of rs-232 signals to ignore it; the kernel with the > jumbo tty patch is sensitive enough to see EOF when the modem recycles. Dropping DTR causes later editions of the SunOS driver to return EIO or ENXIO on any further references to the open descriptor. I remember a discussion inside Sun, which went something like leaving the descriptor available once DTR had been dropped was a security hole, because e.g. someone could do a "tip badnumber" and when it failed, be left back at an "OK" prompt and still connected to the modem port, wherein someone could then do "ATDT19004HOTSEX" or some other costly long distance phone call that they weren't supposed to be allowed to do. This neglected to notice that one could simply "cp /etc/remote ~/remote ; setenv REMOTE ~/remote" and edit it to use a "hardwire"-type entry to one's heart's content, and tip away from there ... (But damned if I can find the place in the driver where this invalidation of the descriptor upon DTR drop is done.) - Greg - ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 7 Apr 96 10:45 BST-1 From: jcl@cix.compulink.co.uk (Mr J C Laughton) Subject: QuickDraw printer from Solaris 2.4 To: Suns-at-home@tigger.net-kitchen.com Is it possible to drive an Apple QuickDraw Inkjet printer from Solaris 2.4? There don't seem to be any termcap entries for non-Po tscript inkjet printers in general. Just basic text printing in a linited range of fonts would be OK. Any suggestions? TIA Jon Laughton - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 08 Apr 96 14:33:59 From: kritsilas@plntree.synapse.net Subject: SCSI ID questions To: Suns-at-Home@tigger.net-kitchen.com Hello, I have just about gotten my Sun 3/60 in a usable form, ( i.e. boots SunOS, the keyboard, mouse, monitor all work). If possible, I would like to have answers to the following questions: 1. The only drive on the system right now is a 100MB HP sd(0,0,0). I would like to add a second, and maybe even third drive. What SCSI ID should the second and third drives be put at? 2. I have no manuals for the system. I have however, picked up a third party Unix administratioin book. In that book, the authors write that the INSTALLBOOT program is used to make any formatted drive bootable. I can't seem to find that program in any of the system directories. Is this because the program is not in my version of SunOS (4.1)? The reason that I would like to make an additional boot drive is that I don't have a tape drive, or the original OS boot tapes for this system, and I am concerned that a hard disk problem would render the system un-bootable. Kostas P.S. Does anybody have a source for a bootprom version 3.0.1 or 3.0.2 for this system? - ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 08 Apr 1996 16:36:59 +0100 From: Kevan Subject: VME cards for high speed serial ports. To: suns-at-home@tigger.net-kitchen.com I have an old 4/110 and would love to find a VME card that has high speed serial ports on it to fit into the spare slot my machine has. I would then be able to use my 28K8 modem at more than the 38K4 of the built in serial ports. Were these things ever produced for 4/110's? If so where would I get second hand ones these days? Many Thanks -- Kevan - ------------------------------ End of Suns-at-Home Digest ******************************