The collected works of thunderbird32

Hello,

I am interested in buying a VITEC RasterFlex HR, if anyone has one. I've kept an eye out on eBay, but they never show-up. The only ones I've seen are on German eBay, and the seller doesn't ship to the United States. Seems to be the best bet for 24-bit color on my non-Creator Ultra 1.

Does anyone have instructions (or a link to) for setting up a Solaris or Linux boot server for installing SunOS 4.1.4? From my internet searching, it should be possible. However, all the guides I find are for setting up a JumpStart server for pushing out Solaris. I have no external CD-ROM drives that want to play nice with my SPARCclassic (weirdly not even the IBM built one for my RS/6000, which I would have thought would work). I can get it to show up during a SCSI probe, but I just get the "Bad Magic number in disk label" error when trying to boot it.

Thanks!

cb88 wrote: You can just get someone on here from Europe to ship it to you by proxy... that's what I did.

I'm waiting to hear back from escimo, but that's hopefully what we'll do.

Thanks for the help. Turns out my install media is actually f'd. I can't mount the CD on my Linux machine either, so it's likely bad. I guess I'll have to settle for Solaris.

Yeah, I realized that later. Learn something new every day, I guess.

I'll be honest, it was a burned CD from an ISO. At first I thought the drive just couldn't read the CD-R, but it turns out it doesn't support 512 byte block mode. I, incorrectly, assumed it would since I was under the impression that AIX required it, and it works fine on my RS/6000. It's possible that only the earlier versions did, or I'm entirely wrong. The drive is a Toshiba XM-3401BMA. Apparently, it can be modified to work ( http://www.pimpworks.org/sun/suncds.html ), but I don't want to have to hack it.

At this point, unless I'm mistaken, it looks like my options are:
1. Buy a Sun compatible CD-ROM
2. Do a network install
3. Modify my existing CD-ROM
4. Just install a newer version of Solaris that doesn't care about the block size (I think 2.6+)

If I do #1, is there any trouble I'll run into burning it (like I did mounting)? Alternatively, if I do #2, I'll have to find a way to mount it somehow so I can pull the required data off for the boot server.

Sorry, I'm kinda fumbling around with this. This has been a fun little project, but I'm a bit out of my depth.

So, I got a Sun CD-ROM, and spent the night getting SunOS installed. It's not the most user-friendly operating system in the world, but that's to be expected due to its age.

I'm using a SCSI2SD card instead of a hard drive, and my first mistake was to set it to a 4GB "drive" size. As SunOS doesn't have a Type for a drive that size, I would have had to set it up by CHS, and I have no idea what I would put there. It's not a physical drive, so it doesn't have any true geometry, and I have no idea what geometry it's emulating. So I switched to a 2.1GB "drive" so I could select the built-in Type for a Sun 2.1GB drive. That way not only did I not have to futz with setting the geometry, I didn't have to fight the partitioner. I need to do some real research on how SunOS does drive partitions (slices?) as that's not a way I'm used to thinking about partitions. At least for future reference.

After getting that to behave, I had trouble getting it to install. I decided to have it do a full install (everything it could), and that turned out to be a bad idea as well. It eventually got to extracting a package (versatec), and it failed saying I needed to mount volume 1 (and that volume -1 was currently mounted!). Maybe I ran out of hard drive space, or maybe that package isn't actually on my install disk? In any case, I restarted and did a minimal install just to see if it would work. The install finished as expected, and after a reboot... it still didn't work.

Turns out the SPARCclassic is expecting the drive to be at a different SCSI ID than I thought. Normally SCSI boot disks need to be at ID 0, but it looks like it's expecting the drive to be at ID 3? After figuring that out, it seems I have a working system. Now all I have to do, is either figure out how to install packages from the CD post install, or do a re-install. That way I can get SunView going.

Thanks for the help everybody. If you have any further suggestions on where to go from here, or resources to educate myself, send them my way.

In that case, perhaps I will change the SCSI ID to 3. It does seem to work fine if I just do a though. Maybe I'll just leave it that way for now.

I got everything going, BTW.

There is also a third option: You could try Tenox's web rendering proxy. It converts web pages to clickable image maps. Should work on most browsers. Though when I tried it on Netscape 1.0, I couldn't get any of the links to work (that might just be Netscape 1.0 though).

You can find it here: https://github.com/tenox7/wrp

Hello,

I'm looking to buy RAM for an IBM RS/6000 7011-250. It's my understanding that it can take a maximum of 256MB of RAM across 8 sticks. I'm looking for a full 256MB (8x 32MB), but am willing to buy smaller amounts (say 4x 32MB). I believe that the 7011-250 can take either the original part (P/N 7011-4012), or PS/2 SIMMs (though only if they are ECC).

Edit: Looks like the FRU for the original part is "73G3235" (according to http://ps-2.kev009.com/rs6000/txt/RS6000_Memory_Grid.txt ).

I'm no longer looking for this. Escimo and I worked out a trade.

Thanks everybody!

Shiunbird wrote: Deliver by proxy? How heavy it is?

My C3700 was about 65lbs shipped, so they're pretty heavy.