Re: Ressurecting an IPX

>> What OS should I run on it today[?]
> NetBSD is probably the best match IMHO. It's low-budget in terms of
> what system resources it needs and has plenty of active support.

One note: don't automatically assume you want the latest version.
NetBSD has gotten rather bloated in recent years, especially in the
compiler, to the point where it can no longer self-host on some
otherwise perfectly reasonable machines.  (Apparently 32M of RAM is
considered unusably low by modern NetBSD; I did a build on a 32M i386
and it paged itself to death.  I haven't tried that on sparc, but doubt
it would be better.)

Except for one machine set up specifically to try 4.0.1, all my SPARCs
are running 1.4T (plus a few hacks of my own, but nothing major).
Depending on what you want and how loaded your machine is, you might
need to go that far back, or something in between might do.  Or you
might find that the most recent _is_ the best for you, of course; I'm
not trying to tell you it's not, just pointing out that you shouldn't
blindly assume that.

> I think you could use any disk up to about 72 gb - maybe 146 - but if
> you want internal drives you're limited to what you can find in the
> 50-pin department.

Well, sort of.  There's a good deal of physical space there by modern
disk standards; an IDE or SATA laptop drive with a bridge to SCSI on it
may well fit.

> The version of the OBP may be the limiting factor in booting options.

As far as I can recall, there is no limit on the size of the boot drive
in any OBP version[%].  What there _is_ sometimes a limit on is the
sectors involved in booting - they must be wholly within the first 1G
of the disk (only the first 2^21 sectors are accessible) on versions
with the limit.  (The issue is that the ROM code is ignorant of 10-byte
CDBs, knowing only the 6-byte kind - and 6-byte CDBs have only 21 bits
of sector number.)

This usually means the boot partition must be within the first 1G,
though I did once use a machine with a large boot partition for quite a
while before realizing it had the limit - my bootblocks and kernels all
happened to be early on the disk for a while[$].

I definitely have found no limit on the size of a non-boot drive,
though I haven't tried anything really big (I think the largest SCSI
disk I've used anywhere is about 34G - the kind mislabeled 36G by their
vendors).

[%] At least not for hardware of this era; once Sun dropped SBus and
    SCSI and downgraded to peecee crap, it all went to hell and there
    may be any number of nasty surprises lurking there.  (And yes, I
    know some of the post-SBus stuff uses SCSI; I have an E200R.)

[$] Probably related to the way the filesystem chooses where to
    allcoate blocks and how I installed new kernels by copying them,
    rather than moving them, to /.  / was inode 2, in cg 0, and the
    filesystem tried to keep files in the same cg as the directories
    they were created in.

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