[rescue] looking for: Sun Carrera 3004 VME board / advise on Sun2 disk install

[Mike Spooner]

Hi Walter,

You mentioned that you had a 3/110 CPU board, which got me thinking: I'm
looking for a 3/110 *chassis*, do you have one you would be willing to
let go of?

-- Mike Spooner

--------- Original Message ---------
From: Walter Belgers
To: ***@sunhelp.org
Date: Sat Nov 10 18:37:56 GMT+00:00 2018
Subject: [rescue] looking for: Sun Carrera 3004 VME board / advise on
Sun2 disk install
Hi all,

I made an interesting rescue last week. a hackerspace moving to a new
place
was getting rid of some old gear, including Sun-gear. 16 years ago (when
it
was not yet a hackerspace) I had already rescued a Sun 2/50 from the same
place, that I got to work using a NetBSD-based boot server. (And a Sun
2/170
that I parted with, still regretting that.. it is somewhere in the UK
AFAIK.)
This time, they sent me some pictures of some Sun 3/xx pizza boxes and a
pile
of VME boards. Included on the pictures was a Sun 3/75, which I have been
looking for for almost 2 decades so I was very eager to pick up the
stuff.

Sadly enough, the Sun 3/75 was just an empty box. I can put in a random
CPU
board, but I would really like to put in a Carerra (b3004b) CPU board,
as
found in the 3/75 (and 3/140, 3/150, 3/160 and 3/180). Itbs a long
shot..
but does anybody have one to spare? It would need to be sent to the
Netherlands. Trading for other VME boards is also possible (e.g. 3/110
CPU).

Not only was the 3/75 empty, a lot of the VME boards were missing parts.
From
a bunch of 8MB boards, the Am2960 chips were taken off, there were a few
3/260
and 4/260 CPU board, with the CPUbs and other support chips gone.. sad
to
see. There were a bunch of TTL and ECL monitors, that were also
dismantled
(broken) already.

But, to make up for that, there was a Sun 2/120 in there as well that
needed
to go! Given the state of the other stuff, I was fearing the worst for
what
was inside, but it looked nice when opened up and cleaned a bit. In it:
501-1004 Sun-2 Ethernet 8:0:20:1:17:51
501-1006 Sun-2 SCSI/Serial
501-1013 1M RAM
501-1013 1M RAM
501-1048 1M RAM
501-1048 1M RAM
501-1082 Xylogics 451
501-1051 2/120 CPU ROM Rev R
SC4000 SCSI bridge
QIC-11 drive
I can still feel my muscles after getting this thing down from three
flights
of stairs.

After cleaning and confirming that the power worked and the CPU worked, I
started adding boards and they all seem to work as well. Typed in
K2<Ctrl-B><Enter> to trigger the Easter Egg ;-) I took out the Xylogics
(have
no drives for it) and put in a video/keyboard board I had lying around
but
then the serial console stops working, so I took it out again and put in
another MB of RAM (setting the jumper to the correct position on the
board).
In the case is a QIC-11 drive, with a SCSI cable that was not connected.
There
is a also a SC4000 SCSI board in the case, not connected.

Slot #9 is empty, but therebs something in the back of my mind telling
me
this slot is special in some kind of way. Can I just use it for any board
that
just uses the P2 connector?

I would like to put a disk in the 2/120 with an OS. I took the NetBSD
machine
I used as a boot server in 2002 for my 2/50, which still booted. I put
the MAC
address in /etc/ethers and that was all that was needed to get the 2/120
to
netboot SunOS 4.0.3, hurray! My plan is to use this running system to
format a
drive, copy all the files over, install boot blocks and that should get
me a
working system. This is probably easier than making boot tapes and fixing
the
capstan rubber of the QIC drive.

I connected an old SCSI disk directly to the 501-1006 board. The
connector on
the bottom is the SCSI so I read. But the kernel does not see a disk
while
booting, nor does the bformatb command see a disk. I used proper
termination (I thinkb& controller - cable - disk - cable - terminator).

So my questions are:
- do I need a special drive for it to be recognised under SunOS 4.0.3 or
can I
just use any old SCSI disk?
- do I connect the drive directly to the SCSI controller, or do I connect
the
SC4000 to the controller and the disk and tape drive to the SC4000?

Cheers,
Walter.
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[r.stricklin]

- do I need a special drive for it to be recognised under SunOS 4.0.3 or can

I

just use any old SCSI disk?

There are a couple potential sources of problem, here.

http://dev.online.typewritten.org/Projects/Sun/8-4841.html

- do I connect the drive directly to the SCSI controller, or do I connect

the

SC4000 to the controller and the disk and tape drive to the SC4000?

Directly. The SC4000 is a QIC02 bridge.

ok
bear.

--
until further notice
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[Dave McGuire]

I did not get any of my drives recognised, but now I got a Micropolis drive
that *is* recognised. I also got a few backplates including a better one for
AUI ethernet. Then I made a stupid mistake and connected it the wrong way
around. I fried the Sun Ethernet board :-((

Those are becoming pretty thin on the ground; I hope you're able to
repair it, or send it to someone who will.

-Dave

[Jon]

I did have a spare 3Com board. But: it wonb t boot from the same server that
worked fine with ie(). The kernel loads, bootparams are exchanged and then it
hangs on NFS requests. On the server, tcpdump reveals that the NFS server does
answer, but with b fragb (NFS fragments?).
Is there something the ec() cannot do that the ie() can? If I can boot from
ec() I can probably initialise the Micropolis disk and get it to boot from
there.

The 3Com board has a much smaller packet buffer, which can play badly with
NFS as the server overloads the client. At least on NetBSD, see:
http://www.netbsd.org/ports/sun2/faq.html

-Jon
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[Dave McGuire]

I still feel miserable for destroying the other one with a rookie mistake. I
do not have the capability to repair it, if anybody else wants to try, I can
give the board to you. What happened is that just above the cable connector,
the PCB burned away so that was probably a short that caused a lot of current
to flow. I canbt see any other obvious damage to components.

Don't sweat it, it happens to all of us once in a while. I'm pretty
sure I know what happened; if you send the board over to me it's likely
that I can repair it.

With the Sun ethernet card, the system boots from the network again. Now I
need to find out how to use /usr/mdec/installboot to install boot blocks on
the Micropolis disk. Cannot find any good info on this.. Maybe the Micropolis
1375 is too big for Sun2?

I don't think so, as I've run Micropolis 1375s on Sun2s. I was
running SunOS 4.0.

-Dave