Sun

So I've had a serious hankering to fiddle around with SPARC systems some more lately (sent my Ultras on to new homes when I moved last fall,) and I'm looking at picking up a Blade workstation for a modest price. I was figuring on dropping OpenBSD on it, and I still might, but I noticed that A. the workstation I'm looking at comes with an XVR-1000, which is unsupported as anything other than a dumb framebuffer outside of Solaris, and B. apparently you can just download Solaris 10 for free now? So I'm kinda pondering giving Solaris another shot, but I'm curious what kind of software I can find for it, and where. In particular, are they still trying to get you to pay for the compiler toolchain, and will I have to use gcc instead?

Yes all of Suns ^h^h^h^h "Oracles" Solaris products are free now, provided you're not a big commercial company. Presumably their "educational" user category includes those of us who have Blades sitting in our home computer rooms.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/indexes/downloads/

Good deal. I just bought it; it's a Blade 2000 with 2x1GHz CPUs, the full 8GB of RAM, and an XVR-1000, along with a couple other cards (a sound card and some kind of weird combination video/Ethernet card...?) Only thing I need to supply is the hard drive. It'll be fun to play around with this

Sounds like a great box, you must have gotten it for a song because even the Blade 2500 Silvers are going pretty cheap on Ebay these days.

Yeah, $75. Probably come out closer to $150 with shipping and replacement hard drives, but still not too shabby...

I can't remember how much I paid for my Blade 2500, which is a good thing, because if I could I'd probably be pretty upset about it...

I think I'v spent $150 in total on my Ultra 45 with a single 1.6ghz USIIIi, 16gb RAM and XVR-2500 graphics.
The ebay prices for the Ultra 25 and 45 are insane though.

I have tried a lot of different OSes on mine but settled with Solaris 10.
It seems like the best thing to run after all. Feels more "right" somehow than *BSD or Linux on a Sparc machine.

Yeah, I was gonna look at an Ultra 45, but that stuff is absolutely bonkers. I don't have that much of a hankering!

The Ultra 45s are nice, but they're not that much nicer than the Blade 2500s to justify the Chinese telephone numbers the sellers are asking for them.

Well, the good news is that it got here in great shape, and I made out better than I'd realized - in addition to the XVR-something (pretty sure it's a 1000, but I can't pull it out for a good look - goddamn cheap aluminum screws!) it includes a Creative "Sound Blaster for Sun Ultra" (some one of their countless indistinguishable PCI wavetable sound cards, I think,) and a SunPCi-II of some description!

The bad news is that it doesn't seem to be doing much of anything when I apply power - the lights come on, the fans spin up, and the DVD drive recognizes when I put in a disk, but there's no video, the Caps Lock key on the Mac USB keyboard I'm using doesn't toggle the light, nothing. Even hooking my USB-to-serial adapter and null-modem cable into serial port A doesn't output anything in the terminal program (9600-8-N-1, correct?)

I'm trying to remember, as the last time I touched a Sun was over a year ago, whether it normally says or does anything before the memory test is complete - maybe it's just taking forever to check 8GB of 60ns RAM? I dunno...I've got a 30-day DOA warranty on the purchase, but I'd hate to have to ship it back...

Progress report: reasoning that it was odd for the Sun to be saying nothing over the serial port, I thought that perhaps one of the CPUs might not be working. Opened it up to check, and to my astonishment, the seller hadn't even secured them in place! They were just sitting loose in the rails, not seated at all, cold to the touch, and not screwed in with the torque screws that were there for that very purpose. Luckily, the torque screwdriver was still inside, and no harm had come to the connectors in transit. Seated them properly and locked 'em down and it's now chatting away over the serial port as it ought to do

The next issue is that it's dead-set on booting from the network, and doesn't seem to listen at all when I send a Ctrl-Break over the serial port at any point in the boot process. I'd try escaping into OpenBoot with the USB keyboard, but as mentioned, it's a Mac design, and the manufacturers helpfully decided that I didn't need that silly old Break key...guess I'll have to dig up a PC USB keyboard when I'm out shopping for a USB mouse while waiting for the hard drives to arrive...unless there's a way to hard-reset the NVRAM parameters without the use of serial or keyboard console?

All Sun hardware is entitled to run Solaris without the need to purchase a license. It's the updates they charge you for.

Also, the Solaris Studio Compiler is free from Oracle too (formerly Sun Studio).

Well, time for another progress report. After like three goddamn tries, I finally tracked down the correct, will-actually-fit drive sleds for this particular model of this particular line of Sun workstations (thank you, MemoryTen,) and got a 13W3-to-VGA adapter since for whatever reason the XVR-1000 can't put the console on the VGA or DVI connectors like a sensible video card. Unfortunately, this is not the end of my problems. The drive sleds fit and the drives seat properly and show up in the probe-scsi results in OBP, so that's all well and good, but unfortunately Solaris is convinced they don't exist. Is there some particular voodoo that you have to do to get new, not-technically-purchased-from-Sun drives all blessed and shriven so that you can, y'know, put stuff on them? Am I going to have to burn an OpenBSD CD just for the purpose of writing a Sun partition table to them?

Also, the console still isn't showing up on my damn monitor. It damn well ought to, it's the same monitor my old Ultras were using, and when I set output-device to screen:r1280x1024x60 in OBP, the monitor gets enough of a signal from the card to try and sync to it, but doesn't actually manage to get it up and working, and the computer just keeps putting OBP out over the serial port. Am I missing something here? Do I need to find a less cheap adapter, a more compatible monitor, or what?

Hmmm, your system sounds pretty borked, you might want to try starting fresh. You can download bootable Solaris 10 CD/DVD images here:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris10/downloads/index.html

No, it can boot the Solaris DVD fine, it just won't recognize the hard drives.

And you said they were FC-AL drives right? What's it say if you do probe-scsi-all?

Yes, FC-AL. probe-scsi shows both of them with the drive ID string, so it's got to be talking to the FC-AL controller correctly, and show-devs lists them under a SCSI device number; it's when I boot into the Solaris installer (or the OpenBSD one) that it doesn't see them.

The Solaris device mapper can get confused if there are two identical disks on the system, might want to try taking one of them out or create an extra partition on one to make them distinguishable from each other...

Well, I can't create a partition on either at the moment, but I'll try taking one out and see if that en-sanes it.

Okay, so this is the log of the boot process:

And now that I get it all in a text editor and look at it, I'd bet that the issue is this "unsupported logical block size" error. I just wonder how one goes about fixing that...