Re: a success story?

On Wed, 23 Mar 2011, Noam Kloos wrote:

> After years of collecting old hardware and building systems I got hand of 3 
> sun LX workstations. One of them broken. One of them with flaws and one of 
> them that might just work. I ripped all systems and gathered the best parts.
>
> Booting from cdrom was a project by itself. The sun LX needs to see scsi id 
> 6. Fixed that still got message can't open boot device. I took the whole self 
> built external SCSI drive apart and discovered a leftover from a jumper 
> sticking in the TEST jumper setting. After removing that it was spinning like 
> a dream.
>
> Installed OpenBSD 4.8. It was possible and it worked. Though 220MB left and I 
> didnt install the compilers. This is what I had meant it for. Googling drive 
> specs of the other disks gave me one with 514MB. That just could be 
> sufficient and it was.
>
> What I now have is a development computer for sparc32 albeit diskspace of 
> 72MB left. (remeber the IBM PC had only 20?)
>
> From here I can boot the system from serial console:
> ok boot disk
>
> It wants to boot from net. After poweron I see checksum failed resetting 
> nvram to default settings. I havent found any place where I could replace a 
> battery. Maybe nvram is dead but it isnt. The extensive diag test writes and 
> reads the nvram ok.
>
> Another error message is IDprom bad.
>
> After all or at the end of the day I have a working sun. Just as I wanted. 
> Only need to hook up my laptop for a serial boot command.
> That is for the time being. Maybe you have suggestions how to do an autoboot 
> to disk.
>
> It is a nice case to look at and it can do some things. Sweet.

hi Noam,

congratulations.    i run a few machines of that age and always the checksum
error and default settings are the battery in the nvram.   i follow the
directions posted here and use external battery and it works again to
remember boot disk and auto boot from a power failure.

the LX is a very nice machine from that era.   and i run OpenBSD on them 
as well...just getting into the differences in pf that came in after 4.6
for my situations with complex routing/nat configs.   it's completely 
different than before, but actually makes the rules shorter and easier to
read later, but it certainly is a jarring dissonance from the established
pf.

adding an external disk if you want to add more space is no problem and
if you get the original Sun cables it looks nice too.

-ron