[SunRescue] My First Sun Box.

[Phil Brutsche]

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A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way, someone said...

>       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?

Serial console - you can use a Mac modem cable, if you can still find one.
You'll also need an AUI tranceiver if you want to get ethernet to work.

Total of < $10US you're lucky/patient.

> 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?

There are a couple ways to load the OS without a CD-ROM:

1) Boot from the network - I've installed SunOS4 and Linux on my own IPX
   over the network
2) Boot from floppy and get everything else over the network - I've
   installed Linux, OpenBSD, and NetBSD with this method

Pretty much any SCSI CD-ROM will work on it; whether or not the IPX can
boot off the NCR CD-ROM is another question :)

I've found that most/all non-PC SCSI CD-ROM drives will boot a Sun,
especially if it's from another unix system - HP, IBM, SGI, etc.

> 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?

Depends on the OS installed, and if there are any PROM passwords.

I'll tenatively say yes.

> Where can I find doc's on the IPX?

sunhelp.org and this mailing list :)

> I don't see much on docs.sun.com for anything tihs old.

You won't - the IPX (and most/all other sun4c systems) are no longer
supported by Sun.

- -- 
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Phil Brutsche				    pbrutsch at tux.creighton.edu

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