[SunRescue] anciente tapes de SunOS.....

[BSD Bob]

>    I have tape images of a few different 2.x versions for Sun-2's. I'm
> pretty sure that SunOS 1.x and 2.x were 68010-only.

OK.  But, for the historical record, ahh, er... rescuing record,
we probably need to try to read those in.

>    As supplied by Sun, everything up to 4.x was on four-track QIC-11 tapes.
> Unfortunately, very few of the QIC-11 drives and their bridgeboards are
> operational. The tapes can be read in a QIC-24 drive, but that doesn't
> help much as only the very last ROM revision for Sun-2's could boot from
> QIC-24.

I would be willing to accept any dead QIC-11 drives and bridgeboards
to see if I could reroll them again.  Most of my QIC-24 tape problems
center on decomposing rubber drive wheels in the capstan heads.  IFF
those can suitably be retreaded, then the rest of the drives should
be fine.  Anyone have any setup docs for the QIC-11 tapes on sun2?

I have been successfully using 3.5 on QIC-24 tapes in QIC-24 drives.
So, 3.x probably will work fine on the 3/xxx class machines with those
9 track tape cartridges, as opposed to the 4 track versions, or it
does on my machines.  Anyone actually tried subbing QIC-24 tape drives
for QIC-11 tape drives on sun2s?

All of my VME crates have the old bridgeboards and 60mb QIC-24 tapes,
and I suspect a lot of the machines out there still do.

>    On the other hand, it doesn't matter too much because IIRC from my one
> attempt to install 2.x, the entire install process was a little shellscript
> on the miniroot that untarred files from the tape onto the disk. Since the
> installation was almost entirely manual, it should be possible to use a
> Sun-3 or SPARC to load the OS onto a hard drive and then transfer the disk
> to the target Sun-2.

That sounds reasonable.  Would it require that you have the correct
bridge boards and ESDI drives or MFM drives, tho?  Will straight scsi
drives work correctly on a sun2?  I would expect that they should,
but there may be some holdover quirks from using the early mfm/esdi
drives.  When I stick mfm or esdi drives in my 3/160 with the sun2
controller, they all work fine, but scsi drives sometimes are hit
and miss.

>    I have a bunch of Sun-2's, but right now none are operational for one
> reason or another. SunOS of that vintage (or even 3.x) is antique enough
> that even if things compile, they may not work as expected. (For example,
> SunOS 3.2 expects that an IP address will map to exactly one name and vice
> versa. Unlike 4.x, it doesn't coredump if there are more, but the program
> will never see anything but the first...) I have contemplated porting
> NetBSD to them, but before I do that I'd like to get the ie driver
> stabilized on the Sun-3, since ie is what all Sun-2's use.

I have had pretty good luck with 3.5.  It generally ran fine, and
seemed to compile most things I needed to test run on it.  I built
gcc-142 and 258 on it, and TeX, and some minor graphics packages.
A few things had trouble, but most seemed to work, reasonably.

Some of us are willing to try to float the old sunos3 boat, if
the opportunity arises.  I don't have any sun2 machines, but I do
have 3 of the sun3 vme crates.  One gets used to their quirks, with
a little (or a lot) of patience.

Yeah, I know what you mean about the sun3 netbsd vme instabilities.
I have been fighting it for a year or more with little good success.
On non-vme singleboard boxes, it seems to do fine.  On vme crates,
I have yet to get a stable machine up well enough to do kernel compiles.

Bob