[Gllug] Gentoo on Sparcstation 20

[John Edwards]

On Thu, Nov 18, 2004 at 11:52:44PM +0000, Adrian McMenamin wrote:
> I have burnt a Gentoo minimal CD and have a SCSI CD rom attached to my Sparc 
> box (the CD have device no set to 6 to ensure external booting). The box is 
> headless and I haven't got a keyboard or a null modem cable.
> 
> When I boot the box there is clearly interaction between the box and the Cd 
> rom but the whole setup appears to reboot every 30 - 40 seconds or so. What I 
> really want is a working network connection so I can ssh to the box or even 
> just find out what the ID of the NIC is :(
> 
> is there any way to do this (eg by editing the iso to automate all the things 
> I need to do, according to the gentoo site to get it to boot), or is there an 
> alternative live cd that will "just work"?
> 
> Adrian
> 
> (Hope this makes sense - very difficult to know what is going on with the box)


Hi
I've not used Gentoo but did have a look at it a few months back 
and at the time it's bootable CDs only had support for 64 bit CPUs:
    http://gentoo.osuosl.org/releases/sparc/2004.3/livecd/
    http://gentoo.osuosl.org/releases/sparc/2004.2/livecd/README.html

If this is still the case then the SparcStation series only have 32 bits 
CPUs and so if the kernel on the CD is only 64 bit that it could well be 
crashing.

A serial cable with null modem should only cost a couple of quid and is 
probably the best next step.

I'm not sure if anyone else has mentioned www.sunhelp.org but they have 
a lot of information on old Sun kit there, including FAQs on the OpenBoot 
PROM and what happens when the NVRAM battery dies and the machine losses 
it's ethernet MAC addresss.


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|       John Edwards    Email: John.Edwards at uk.com        |
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