Terry Collins was once rumoured to have said:
> Sent to Slug and Computerbank NSW due to interest from both lists.
>
> I've started a WWW page at http://www.woa.com.au/terryc/hardware/sparc/
> to provide a convenient list of URLs for people wanting further
> information/ideas/how-tos, etc. Thanks to Rachael and Crossfire for
> their information and contributions.
>
> Basically there were four Sparc 10s. Three have been taken and only
> one is left (50Mhz cpu, 32Mb ram, no hard disk at present - we might
> have a hard disk for it when I get Solaris 8 installed).
>
> Can anyone tell me how the Sparc 10 knows about its boot hard disk? i.e.
> does it just boot off a scsi at id0 or do you have to do something like
> enter hard disk parameters into the nvram.
There are no hard disk parameters to be entered - this is all SCSI -
and SCSI is smarter than that.
However, due to Sun weirdness the default disk is on SCSI ID2, not ID0
- so just be warey. The default boot device and arguments is set in
the boot-device environment in the PROM.
Also do a google search for the Sun hardware FAQ, which has some
helpful pointers with modern PROMs and hardware configurations.
Sun PROMS are very helpful too in the sense their inbuilt help isn't
complete crap. :)
> Still available are the IPX (40Mb + floppy), IPC (8Mb + floppy),
> Classic (48Mb - no floppy) and LX (32Mb + floppy). Hard disk sizes
> are unknown at this stage
My personal experience is that Classics and LXs are very responsive
compared to the IPX and IPC - I've had a Sparc Classic running RH6.0
in the past as it quite a usuable self-hosting workstation. As for
the LX? we had one at JCSMR when I worked there which now runs
http://cbis.anu.edu.au/ on OpenBSD 2.7.
IPCs and IPXs would make great colour XTerminals :)
> The first two of these systems will be sold with keyboard, mouse and
> cables, the third will get a keyboard and the four none of these.
> Apparently, if they do not detect a keyboard, they will boot headless
> automatically to the serial port. We didn't get around to confirming
> this on the day.
This is true for the PROMs. No guarntees that any OS other than
Solaris will obey it. I'm pretty sure that OpenBSD and NetBSD will
though - not sure about Linux.
> Unfortunately, none of the Solaris or Indy software arrived, so we
> were not able to test install any of the systems, nor were we able
> to boot onto a sparc linux floppy either.
I should be availible next weekend and I can tow along my Solaris
discs if so desired - as long as its moderately accessible by rail.
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