[Gllug] Sun Sparcstation - is it any use...?

[John Edwards]

On Thu, Aug 11, 2005 at 12:11:22AM +0100, Dylan wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I have a SPARCstation 5 lying around here and am wondering what to do 
> with it...

Have a read of the excellant Sun Hardware Reference:
	http://www.sunhelp.org/hardware
And for a few pictures and chatty description:
	http://www.obsolyte.com/


Most of the rest of this email is from memory, so take it with a pinch 
of salt.

> It has not floppy drive installed. On-board it has (from left to right 
> looking at the back) a socket with the broken-diamond SCSI symbol, but 
> it's smaller than any SCSI connector I've come across; two d-type like 
> sockets (one above the other) with "// / <...>" below them; an RJ45 
> with TP <...> below (which I figure is ethernet); two serial ports; 
> mini-din keyboard (will a PC keyboard work in there?); and audio jacks.
> 
> There are three add-in boards: an ISDN, and two which each have an RJ45 
> (same markings as above) and a SCSI connector.
> 
> My questions are:
> 
> What are the connectors for? 

The SCSI socket is a standard 50 pin FastSCSI socket.

The RJ45 is 10baseT ethernet.

The serial ports are standard 25 pin RS232.

The mini-din is for the Sun keyboard/mouse bus, which is nothing like
the PC, more like the old Apple Bus. Plug a Sun keyboard in the machine, 
then plug an optional mouse into the keyboard.

Spare Type5 keyboards usually cost about a tenner, and are large, have 
soft touch keys, and lots of unused buttons. A lot of the ones in the 
UK still used US terminal keyboard layouts, so check first.

Audio is something I've never really used much with Sun machines. 
Probably not great quality.

Hard drive sockets are SCA SCSI, and there is a 50 pin internal SCSI 
connector for a CDROM. I think the floppy drive is a standard 34 pin 
same as the PC.


> Is any of them a monitor?

The video output for a monitor on the Sparcstation 5 will be an addon 
SBUS card with a 13W3. That's a two line 13 pin D with two small coax 
on one side and a third on the other. Something like this:
	O O .:::::: 0

The 13W3 video output requires a 13W3 monitor (also used by SGI) or an 
adapter (10-15 UKP). Spare 8 bit video cards should be easy to scrounge, 
though some people liked to multihead Sun machines (up to 4 cards would 
work I think).

But it's not compulsory to have a video card as the Sun machines work 
well with a serial terminal, usually VT100 compatible at 9600 baud and 
8N1 (IIRC). This also removes the requirement to have a keyboard.
A Linux serial comms program like Minicom or dip will work.

Be warned though, disconnecting a normal serial cable will send a BREAK 
signal and send the machine into PROM mode (kind of like the PC BIOS), 
which means the OS stops responding.


> What might the RJ45/SCSI boards be?

They could be Sun Swift cards, which were combined ethernet and SCSI 
(100baseT and FastWide I think).


> How can I go about getting some variety of Linux on the box since I 
> don't know how it is currently configured?

Debian runs well on them, except that dselect can take minutes to 
startup. Slackware may also run.

To boot from a CDROM attach a SCSI CD drive as ID 6. Switch on and 
press STOP-A on the keyboard or send a BREAK on the terminal to get 
the machine into PROM mode. Then I think the command is "boot cdrom".

Other options are to plug in a floppy drive (I think PC ones work) or 
boot over the network using DHCP/BOOTP, TFTP and NFS (the PROM command 
is probably "boot net")

Have a read of the above Hardware Reference and the OS install guide 
for more info or other booting suggestions.


> What use could it be put to?

This is largely a matter of RAM, I think the max was 256MB (8x32).

Low RAM usage are things like DNS and DHCP.
Serving static web pages or FTP are ideas if it's got more than 64MB.

I had a Sparcstation 5 with Debian running DNS, DHCP and LDAP 
authenication for a small company. Only problem was that other servers 
were using Samba, which was making a lot of UID/GID lookups to LDAP 
each time it switches directories, and so cause a noticable fraction 
of a second delay.


-- 
#---------------------------------------------------------#
|    John Edwards   Email: john at cornerstonelinux.co.uk    |
|                                                         |
| A. Because it breaks the logical sequence of discussion |
| Q. Why is top posting bad ?                             |
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