Re: [TCLUG:14315] sun box - kind of off the subject

[Jon Schewe <jpschewe@eggplant.mtu.net>]

Erick Stohr <visuale1@earthlink.net> writes:

> am thinking of getting a solaris box for fun at home(i have a sparc 1+,
> but don't know what to do with it becuase it has no floppy or cdrom and
> i don't know how to reach it on my intranet because i don't know it's
> name nor ip, any ideas are also apprceciated).  What models of solaris

There are a couple of things you can do.

- Get a SCSI CD-ROM drive and hook it up to the back and boot off that, needs
to be ID6 and 512 block size, it's usually a jumper on the back.  If you have
that nasty old 50 connector that looks like a huge serial port, I have a cable
you can borrow that converts it to standard SCSI.  They're pretty tough to
find.

- Boot it off the network.  Setup another machine to act as a rarp and bootp
server.  Then turn on the sparc and get to the EPROM prompt, L1-A if you're
using a sun keyboard, if you're using a dumb terminal sending a break should
do it.  Then do 'boot le0' and it should work or you get a message that tells
you what boot options are available.

BTW if you don't have a monitor and keyboard for it, just plug a serial cable
into serial port A, if there are two, and run that into a machine with a term
program pointed at the serial port and set the terminal to 9600,8,N,1 and you
should get output.  If you get funny stuff, try 9600,7,E,0.

As you might have guessed I've done some work with these.  I've got an old
Sun3/50 that I've installed SunOS and NetBSD on, using tape, cdrom and network
installs.  Tape is really fun :)


-- 
Jon Schewe 
http://eggplant.mtu.net/~jpschewe
schewe@tcfreenet.org