On Sun, Feb 04, 2001 at 05:27:18PM +1100, Crossfire wrote:
> > 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.
>
> 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.
>From memory the default boot disk on an SS10 is ID 3, and the two internal
disks are usually ID 1 and 3. However, as the SS10's use SCSI-2 connectors
and not SCA list the SS4/5/20/etc, you can set the disks to whatever you
wait.
If you want to boot off another target you just need to specify it, either
with something like "boot disk0" to boot of ID 0, "boot cdrom", "boot net",
"boot tape" etc, or even something like giving it a full path to the device
(probe-scsi to get the path). You can make the new device permanent using
boot-device prom variable - "setenv boot-device disk0"
> > 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.
Classics, LX and IPX are all similar spec and make slow, but OK machines
for playing with. The IPC is fairly slow (about half the speed of the
Classic).
> IPCs and IPXs would make great colour XTerminals :)
The only real problem is that at most you're probably going to have an
8-bit video card in them (the IPCs are actually mono on-board, but will
happily take a CGsix or similar card. IPX is CGsix, Classic CGthree)
As for what software to run on them, there's a few options...
XKernel is a hacked up SunOS 4.1.x kernel/X server which basically just
turns the machine in an X server. It's made to be booted over the network
from another machine (historically a Sun, but I'm sure you could talk a
Linux box into doing it), and thus needs no local hard disk. It's
reasonably fast, but unfortunately is a fairly old version of X.
Another option is something I've been setting up of late. It's basically
the same thing as XKernel, but based on Linux and X11R6.4. Boots over the
network so again needs no local disk, and is little more than an X server.
It's still a work in progress, but if anyones interested in playing with
it, let me know. It needs a little more memory than XKernel, but it has
the advantage of using a later version of X.
> > 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.
I'd be fairly confident any OS will. Linux definitely does. It's fairly
uncommon to see a Sun server with a monitor attached...
If anyone's interested in what a higher-end Sparc machine can actually do,
I recently installed RedHat 6.2 on an E3500 with 4x400Mhz Ultrasparc-II's
and 4Gb of memory. Compiled a fairly standard Linux kernel in 97 seconds!
I'm going to try and install Linux on a SunBlade-1000 (single 750Mhz
Ultrasparc-III) in the next few days too...
Scott.
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