Re: Sparc Classic: ethernet hardware issue

On Fri, 23 May 2003, Will Roberts wrote:

>I am trying to install SuSE linux 7.3 for Sparc onto an old Sparc Classic.
>All is well except I discovered that the Classic has a bad on-board
>ethernet port.  This causes both the obvious problem (no network connection)
>and the side effect of:
>
>      INIT: Id "3" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
>      INIT: Id "6" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
>      INIT: Id "2" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
>      INIT: Id "4" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
>      etc.
...<snip>...

You are not telling whether that is the case, but I bet you are running
the system headless, right? If I'm right, your problem has probably got
nothing to do with the networking device. I had exactly the same problem
right after installing on my Ultra1, which I run headless.

The solution (well, the symptom-treatment, to be exact) was to
outcomment the 'mingetty' lines in /etc/inittab. I don't know how to
*really* cure the problem. I have seen it mentioned somewhere that this
might be about a bug in 'init'. Remember to remove the outcommenting
from the lines in /etc/inittab, when you connect monitor and keyboard to
the system again.

Best regards,
David List