[SunRescue] My First Sun Box.

[Gil Young]

Congradulations on your first sparc!  That is great news.  First off, to
learn more about your model, check the sun hardware faq:

http://www.nectar.com/sun-hardware-faq

For the older models (like your IPX), you can use any CD-ROM capable of 512
byte block size (I think they come in 2 flavors, 512 and 2048, some are
jumper selectable, others are not).  Check with your CD-ROM manufacturer to
see if your SCSI CD-ROM can do 512 byte blocks.

And yes, you can boot off of CD, mount the drive, and edit the password
file, assuming there is a system on the drive.  But with such a small drive
and a slower system, I would recommend a minimla install of BSD, unless the
purpose was to learn Solaris.  I think Soalris 7 is the latest OS release
you can run.  If you get another type of drive, I would recommend a pair of
4 gig's mirrored so as to provide redundancy.  4 Gig is a nice number to
work with and keeps it low $ for the budget concious.

And finally, the cheapest way to config this box is to buy an IPX serial
cable:

http://www.ultraspec.com/8033.asp?Id=177


Best Wishes!

Gil


----- Original Message -----
From: <tadghe at surf-ici.com>
To: <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Friday, February 16, 2001 7:56 PM
Subject: [SunRescue] My First Sun Box.


>       Good Evening!
>
>
> Today was a Bright day.
>
> I have my first Sun box, an old IPX and a external drive (says 425 MB on
front,
> but 1.05GB on bottom).
>
> I have a Ton of questions, so please bear with me.
>
> because I have no doc's, keyboard, mouse, monitor, or CDROM for the box.
> What's going to be the cheapest way for me to get this up and running?
>
> I know I can use some sort of Serial Connection in place of a monitor, but
how
> do I reload the OS without a CDROM? (or where can I find a CDROM drive for
it
> cheap?) I do have an old NCR 4x SCSI cdrom drive (pulled from an old NCR
PC),
> is there a way to use that?
>
> Alternatively, since I don't have any idea what the passwords on the box
will
> be, can I boot into single user mode and wipe them and use it as is?
>
>
> Where can I find doc's on the IPX? I don't see much on docs.sun.com for
> anything tihs old.
>
> Thanks for your help!
>
> Christopher.
>
>
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