[sclug] Sun SPARC help

[Jon Masters]

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Matt wrote:

| On Sat, 2004-11-20 at 17:57, Alex Butcher wrote:

|>On Sat, 20 Nov 2004, Neil Owens wrote:

|>>I have no way of knowing what it's doing - there's no output on 'A'.
|>>Sending a Break ( either by 'STOP A' on a Sun keyboard or by sending
a Break
|>>from TeraTerm) has no effect.  I don't get as far as the OBP. I can't
see or
|>>find a 'reset CMOS' jumper anywhere.  even if the NVRAM battery is
dead it
|>>should still get me a OBP prompt......
|>
|>Hmmm... are you sure about that last bit?

|>It's been a while since I've seen a SPARC with a dead NVRAM battery but my
|>dodgy DRAM is telling me that it just hangs, and you don't get to do
|>anything.

|>Is it worth trying to swap the NVRAM with the one from the working machine
|>to be sure?

| A dead NVRAM battery will just get you the infamous MAC address of
| ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff, etc. when the banner is displayed, it should still
| come up to OBP (possibly complaining as it goes).

Doesn't always. But the good news is that you can reset the NVRAM...

| If you have the keyboard, try hitting/holding Stop+N when you power the
| machine on, that should reset the NVRAM to defaults, including resetting
| the serial port A settings, etc. so you should be able to get a console.

...indeed. I had a similar position of having several IPC/IPX machines
that did and didn't work properly (in various combination thereof) and
followed the NVRAM battery replacement instructions, on obsolyte.com
(twice, for two systems). The result was two working boxes with stupid
MACs that served as internal house storage and alarm clocks.

An IPC running tplay is an excellent housemate accessible alarm clock.
We used to use one as a means of the guys in my house waking me up.
Prerendered festival phrases can be copied accross via Samba and played
in glorious 8bit audio.

| Other things to check might be RAM

Do please bear in mind that the IPC and IPX systems had segmented memory
which is SPARC specific. The memory in different banks could be at
different physical address ranges which were remapped by the MMU to a
linear virtual address space. Since the kernel needs a base amount of
physically contiguous memory to load correctly, you effectively must be
at least 4MB in the first bank for it to actually run Linux.

Of course, get it booting first. I've got a bunch of old SPARCs and
monitors at home and probably a cable somewhere too - one thing I don't
have is a car or a lot of time, but in the worst case it's potentially
possible for you to bring the IPX around for a few hours next week.

Cheers,

Jon.
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