Re: a success story?

> After years of collecting old hardware and building systems I got
> hand of 3 sun LX workstations.

Sweet.

> What I now have is a development computer for sparc32 albeit
> diskspace of 72MB left.

I'd strongly recommend getting a bigger disk for it.  Pretty much any
half-height or thinner 50pin SCSI disk should Just Work, in my
experience; at worst you'll have to make sure your boot partition is in
the first gig of the disk.  There may be OS limitations, but as far as
I can recall NetBSD doesn't have any relevant limitations, so I'd
expect Open wouldn't either.

> (remeber the IBM PC had only 20?)

No, actually; I never worked with the IBM PC.  (I'm not sure whether
I'm proud of that, ashamed of it, or what.... :-)

> 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.

It's integral to the timekeeper chip.  There's a FAQ about them at
http://www.squirrel.com/squirrel/sun-nvram-hostid.faq.html (or at least
there was a minute or two ago); I've added new batteries to at least
two such chips based on that information, so it's not _totally_ off the
wall.

> Maybe nvram is dead but it isnt.  The extensive diag test writes and
> reads the nvram ok.

It can still be dead with respect to retaining things during machine
power-down without being dead to the diag tests.  I'm not sure it's
even electrically possible for the host to tell whether the battery is
dead without powering down the whole machine.

> Another error message is IDprom bad.

This all sounds like a dead timekeeper battery.  Given the LX's age,
this is not surprising if it has the original chip in it.  Another sign
is usually a reported Ethernet MAC of ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff (which is
obviously bogus to those who know their Ethernet details - that's the
broadcast address).

> Maybe you have suggestions how to do an autoboot to disk.

Once you have a good battery in the NVRAM chip, it's just a question of
a few setenv commands in the ROM monitor; most OSes for that hardware
have some way to do similar things once the OS is up.  NetBSD calls it
"eeprom"; OpenBSD might still be similar enough to use the same name,
or it might not.

I'm away from mine at the moment, but I think what you want to set here
are the boot-device and auto-boot? variables.

> It is a nice case to look at and it can do some things.  Sweet.

Indeed!

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