headers
Sandwich Maker | 2 Jan 2007 19:48
Picon

Re: Quad Fast Ethernet on an IPX?

" From: "Darrick Burch" <darrick <at> tuffmail.com>
" 
" 
" Reading Sun's own manuals on this card, I noticed that this card is NOT
" supported on the IPX.  Perhaps this is why I'm having trouble?  Is there a
" reason why this card doesn't work on this machine?  I was merely
" curious...

'not supported' means sun didn't test the combo, probably because the
ipx was eol before the qfe came out.

" Is it possible to upgrade the OBP on this model?  Like you, I was
" suspecting that perhaps my version of OpenBoot had something to do with my
" troubles.  However, I was unable to get out of Sun's website what I needed
" to know, particularly what the latest version of OpenBoot is for this
" machine and what part number the replacement PROM would be.  I'm assuming
" that Sun wouldn't freely distribute the PROM code so that I could burn my
" own.

craig dewick - who just posted - had an archive of obp code at his
site, www.sunshack.org.  just looked and couldn't find it though.
________________________________________________________________________
Andrew Hay                                  the genius nature
internet rambler                            is to see what all have seen
adh <at> an.bradford.ma.us                       and think what none thought
Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |
headers
Eric Rudolph Pizzani | 4 Jan 2007 08:11

Ultra 10 IDE

Hey all,
I was wondering, is there anyway, anyway at all of fixing the  
performance flaws of the Ultra 10's IDE?
Failing that, how does one reflash a SCSI card so it can be used on a  
SPARC machine? I've got cards intended for an Alpha and for an x86  
(Adaptec).
I'm some what desperate to get this machine to the point where it'll  
actually fly.

Many Thanks,
Eric.
Permalink | Reply | 7 comments |
headers
silvercreekvalley | 4 Jan 2007 14:07
Picon
Favicon

Ancient Artifacts

I'm in the slow (very slow) process of restoring an
old multibus Sun
machine. Its going OK, the CPU boots up recognises the
RAM and graphics
card, etc. Need to hook up an old SCSI disk and tape
next.

Just wondered if anyone has any of the old manuals for
the multibus
cards. These used to hold a lot of useful info, much
of which is no
longer on the web. Particulaly info on the older
graphics cards (cg1,
bw1 etc).

I'm aware of the exellent sun faq which has been a
great help, and have
found the CPU manuals on bitsavers etc.

I also wondered if anyone had ever approached Sun with
a view to getting
the ancient versions of SunOS made available for
hobby/collector use?
NetBSD is great and it a truly amazing achievement to
get it running on
Sun 2 machines - but many of the old but fun multibus
cards remain
unsupported (eg the Sky Floating point card and the
cg1).
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |
headers
Oscar Endre Edvardsen | 6 Jan 2007 16:22
Picon

Re: Ultra 10 IDE


Hi! This is my first message to this list, please be gentle :-)

On Thu, 4 Jan 2007, Eric Rudolph Pizzani wrote:

> I was wondering, is there anyway, anyway at all of fixing the performance 
> flaws of the Ultra 10's IDE?

Not as far as I know. But you might get slighly better performance 
ditching the original 5400 RPM disk and installing a faster IDE disc. 
It'll still be pretty slow, though.

> Failing that, how does one reflash a SCSI card so it can be used on a SPARC 
> machine? I've got cards intended for an Alpha and for an x86 (Adaptec).
> I'm some what desperate to get this machine to the point where it'll actually 
> fly.

If you use BSD or Linux you could use just about any pci scsi card, and 
boot from IDE. But since you ask about sparc support I assume you need it 
to be recognized by the OBP. I know some third party scsi cards eighter 
come with, or can be flashed with OpenBoot instructions, like some symbios 
cards. Unfortunatly I don't which cards will work.

I'm posting this message from an Ultra 5 with a scsi card, but I'm not 
sure which one. If you can't make any of your existing scsi cards work 
in your U10, you could always find a Sun branded scsi card on ebay. 
They're quite cheap these days.

Oscar
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 1 comment |
headers
Michael-John Turner | 6 Jan 2007 19:59
Picon

Re: Ultra 10 IDE

On Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 06:11:55PM +1100, Eric Rudolph Pizzani wrote:
> I was wondering, is there anyway, anyway at all of fixing the  
> performance flaws of the Ultra 10's IDE?

Not AFAIK, no - it's just plain broken. You may be able to get the PROM to
boot from a PCI IDE card, but I've not tried it myself. The card would also
have to be supported by whatever OS you're using - the open source OSes
would certainly work, but I'm not sure about Solaris. See
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/sparc64/faq.html#pci-cards for details.

> Failing that, how does one reflash a SCSI card so it can be used on a  
> SPARC machine? I've got cards intended for an Alpha and for an x86  
> (Adaptec).

I've read various stories about a near mythical Adaptec 294x-based card
with OpenBoot support, but I've not seen any confirmation from anyone who's
ever got one working in a Sun (I think the card was designed for Mac
systems).

By far the easiest approach is to get a SCSI card with the Symbios/LSI
Logic 875 chipset - it's supported by the PROM, so you'll be able to boot
from it, etc. Any PCI card will do - OpenBoot contains support for the
chipset and the PC BIOS is ignored. I have one such card in my Ultra 10 and
it works like a charm with NetBSD.

-mj
--

-- 
Michael-John Turner | http://mjturner.net/
mj <at> turner.org.za    | Open Source in WC ZA - http://www.clug.org.za/
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 3 comments |
headers
Jima | 6 Jan 2007 23:24

Re: Quad Fast Ethernet on an IPX?

On Sat, 30 Dec 2006, Darrick Burch wrote:
> I bought a Quad Fast Ethernet adapter (SBUS, of course) with the intent of
> using it in a SPARCStation IPX that was given to me several years ago.  It
> appears that OpenBoot discovers the adapter, as does the Linux kernel I'm
> using (the stock 2.2.20 kernel that came with Debian).
>
...
>
> Reading Sun's own manuals on this card, I noticed that this card is NOT
> supported on the IPX.  Perhaps this is why I'm having trouble?  Is there a
> reason why this card doesn't work on this machine?  I was merely
> curious...

  This is reaching back a couple of years (since I actually attempted 
this), but as I recall, when I attempted to put a QFE in an SS4 (an also 
officially-unsupported platform for the card, but quite newer than the 
IPX), I ran into some...shall we say, system unhappiness.  I forget if the 
unhappiness was more PROM-ish or (Linux) kernel-related, but the two did 
not get along.  ISTR a QE working much better, though.
  The same QFE worked quite well in an Ultra 1 and Ultra 2, however (to 
rule out bad hardware).

      Jima
Permalink | Reply | 4 comments |
headers
M Thompson | 7 Jan 2007 00:39

Re: Ancient Artifacts

If you have a 501-1006 SCSI/Serial board connecting a SCSI disk is 
easy. The 2/120 originally shipped with MFM or ESDI disks that were 
connected to the SCSI controller by an adapter board. If you don't 
have a SCSI board it might be easier to find a Xylogicxs 450 or 451 
controller and some SMD disks.

>I'm in the slow (very slow) process of restoring an old multibus Sun
>machine. Its going OK, the CPU boots up recognises the RAM and graphics
>card, etc. Need to hook up an old SCSI disk and tape next.
><snip>
>Thanks
>
>Ian.

Michael Thompson
Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |
headers
Magnus | 7 Jan 2007 02:00
Gravatar

Re: Ultra 10 IDE

Oscar Endre Edvardsen wrote:

> Not as far as I know. But you might get slighly better performance 
> ditching the original 5400 RPM disk and installing a faster IDE disc. 
> It'll still be pretty slow, though.

The best performance I've been able to get out of the Ultra 5 / Ultra 10 
IDE controller is a pitiful 5 to 6 MB/sec on direct disk reads.  It's 
quite shameful.

> If you use BSD or Linux you could use just about any pci scsi card, and 
> boot from IDE. But since you ask about sparc support I assume you need 
> it to be recognized by the OBP. I know some third party scsi cards 
> eighter come with, or can be flashed with OpenBoot instructions, like 
> some symbios cards. Unfortunatly I don't which cards will work.

Symbios SYM22801 will get you Wide UltraSCSI, which is spec'd at 
40MB/sec and real world I get pretty darned close to that with fast 
Ultra320 drives.  Huge improvement over the on-board IDE, and you can 
boot off it directly.

> I'm posting this message from an Ultra 5 with a scsi card, but I'm not 
> sure which one. If you can't make any of your existing scsi cards work 
> in your U10, you could always find a Sun branded scsi card on ebay. 
> They're quite cheap these days.

The caveat is that Wide UltraSCSI cards are cheap.  If you want to move 
to a more modern standard like Ultra320, prepare to shell out a lot of 
dough.  That's the situation that I'm in now; rich on Ultra320 drives, 
but poor on controllers.
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |
headers
Mark G. Thomas | 7 Jan 2007 03:31

Re: E3500

Hi,

On Wed, Dec 20, 2006 at 09:27:18PM +0100, Ben Lewis wrote:
> Hello Folks
> 
> I managed to obtain an Enterprise 3500 this week. Quite by chance I  
> passed the lab at work and noticed that this machine was in the  
...
> It has 4Gb of RAM, 5 x 18Gb disks and six processors. Massive  
> overkill for a home machine but it's fun to run even if it's much too  
> noisy to leave running over night. If only I had a basement. The good  

Here are some notes about the E3500, based on my experiences.  I use
one for my home/personal fileserver/mailserver.  Mine has both an S-Bus
and a PCI I/O board, with gigabit ethernet in a PCI slot.

- Old system boards have round heatsinks threaded onto chip brackets that break.
  New system boards have square heatsinks, using thermal epoxy to hold them.
  If you have round threaded heatsinks, make sure none are broken, and consider
  either finding newer system boards or using special thermal epoxy to fix them.

- A damaged connector on a CPU, IO, or clock board can break pins on the 
   backplane.  Be very careful when you insert boards, and inspect any new 
   boards you receive carefully before insertion.  Replacing that backplane 
   due to broken pins is a big project.

- Consider using just one system board with two processors if you want to 
   save on electricity and heat generation.

- Make sure you have the newest firmware on all the boards, Sun patch 103346-30
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 2 comments |
headers
Ben Lewis | 7 Jan 2007 18:13

Re: Ultra 10 IDE

> I've got cards intended for an Alpha and for an x86 (Adaptec).

Hello Eric

Have you have a look at the chipset on the cards? I've got an PCI  
SCSI card with an Adaptec* chipset which came out of a HP Kayak PC   
and this works fine in an Ultra 5. I would give it a try and see if  
they work.

Best regards

Ben

*Not 100% sure on this without opening the case.
Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |

Gmane