[CLUE-Tech] Linux on Sparc: Need Media

[Chris Tubutis]

--- Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com> wrote:
> On Jun 7, 2004, at 5:05 PM, Jed S. Baer wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, 6 Jun 2004 19:41:25 -0600
> > "Jed S. Baer" <thag at frii.com> wrote:

> > Incorrect configuration checksum
> > <snip>
> > The IDPROM contents are invalid
> 
> On-board battery is dead, most likely.  I think I've seen that one 
> before.

Hard to say here... I went to my sunsolve account and searched on that
error, they talk about OBP upgrades but for sun4u sun enterprise
3x00/4x00/5x00/6x00 only (no surprise). But reading some of the bug
reports, I see things like: "T(rhfa) timing violation causing devices
behind pci-pci bridge not probed." IMHO with all the problems I'm
seeing I suspect the EEPROM is bad in which case I'd say "Give it up;
it's dead, Jim." Although with these Sun boxes it's really hard to
tell....

> Probably won't keep time correctly on reboot...
> 
> > Boot device: /sbus/le at 0,c00000 File and args:
> > Internal loopback test -- Did not receive expected loopback packet.
> > Can't open boot device
> 
> That le is "local ethernet" I think -- they're set to boot from 
> loopback???  That's just odd.  Probably a side-effect of the above 
> problem.  You might need to get the thing to actually save boot 
> parameters to EPROM, and it may be unable to do that.  Perhaps
> someone 
> that actually worked on IPX's can chime in, but I have a feeling you 
> won't find a whole lot of people that remember them intimately on
> many 
> lists -- hopefully some Net-based documentation can be still Googled.

Could it be the thing is set up to boot off the network? I forget the
OBP command to look at the boot device, type 'help' at the OK prompt
and see what's available. IIRC setting the auto-boot? parm to false
should keep it from booting on power-up but apparently it didn't like
that command....

> > ok set auto-boot?=false
> > stack underflow
> 
> The version of OpenBoot on those machines doesn't understand that 
> command, it would appear.

Could be, or maybe something else is FUBAR at this point....

> 
> > ok reset-all
> > reset-all? (no opportunity to answer here, returned to prompt)
> 
> Same problem, looks like.

I'd expect it to complain if it didn't understand reset-all rather than
just return a prompt, it's supposed to go reboot itself. What does just
"reset" do?

> > The external CD drive seems non-functional. There are two LEDs,
> green 
> > and
> > red. The green LED flashes at about 4hz whenever the shoebox is 
> > powered up
> > -- the LEDs are part of the shoebox, not the drive itself. Probably
> > something disconnected inside the shoebox, but power and the drive 
> > cable
> > are both plugged in.
> 
> Could be that you don't have the SCSI bus terminated properly.  Is 
> there a terminator on one connector on the back of that drive?  You
> do 
> have to do old-fashioned SCSI termination on older Suns, of course.  
> Those machines are pre-auto-termination.
> 
> If it's a Sun drive, it'll probably also have a little window and a 
> number with buttons above and below to set the SCSI ID of the CD-ROM
> -- 
> Sun boxes like that set to "6".
> 
> The continuous blinking sounds bad... like it thinks there's a disc
> in 
> it when there's not.  It's probably old enough it'll have a hard time

In addition to that stuff just mentioned, I've seen dying hard drives
cause problems on the SCSI bus. I don't know that the lack of a
terminator will greatly affect it (I've run Sun boxes that way lots of
times) but it very well could. I agree about the continuous blinking,
though, it appears it seems to think there's a CD in the drive. And
yeah, SCSI ID 6 is the default tho that's configurable in the OBP
stuff.

> They'll be really slow.  They're typically 40 Mhz processors and 
> 32-bit, they're not UltraSparc 64-bit machines.
> 
> I have an Ultra 1 that's an UltraSparc 64-bit 127 MHz machine and
> it's 
> ancient.  In non-scientific comparison, it compares favorably to 
> another Pentium II machine I have here -- they feel about that same 
> speed running Debian Linux... with slightly faster I/O to the SCSI 
> devices on the Sun box.

I have a SPARC5 (amongst a few other Sun boxes) I think it's got a 70
MHz CPU. Still runs Solaris 2.6, I don't see a reason to spend a day
trying to "upgrade" it when this works great.

> Basically the really old Suns can be useful for stuff like DNS
> servers, 
> secondary MX'es, etc... but they're pretty slow for anything CPU 
> intensive.  Some people like to netboot them as X terms.  As old as 
> those SCSI disks are, I'm not sure I would trust them to anything
> other 
> than easily-replaceable data, though.

Yup...

ct


	
		
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