[SunRescue] Usenet: SUN 330 Free to good home

[Dave Reader]

On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, BSD Bob the old greybeard BSD freak wrote:

> > saw this on misc.forsale.computers.workstation:
> 
> If noone objects in shrieking horror, may I claim dibsies on this
> critter?  It's in town, here, and the shipping would be horrible,
> to anyone else, right?.....(:+}}...
> 
> > Free to good home 1 SUN SPARC 330
> 
> What boardset is this thing likely to have?  It looks like it should
> be pretty close to my 4/260, but are the ram, etc, boards compatible?
> Should I expect the usual 12 slot deskside case, or would it be something
> else?

It's smaller. Slightly shorter & narrower than a 12 slot. only has 3 12U
VME slots, and a pair each of 6U and 3U. All cards are installed
vertically from the top (underneath a slide-off cover).

Memory is 8x 30pin simm sockets on the CPU card - these can only be 1Mb
each when the 4/300 cpu is used in the 330 system - and upto two memory
boards in the 3U slots, which take 16x 30pin simms each - 1 or 4Mb.

Maximal configuration is 8 x 1Mb on CPU, and 1 board of 16 x 4Mb giving
72Mb total. Alternatively, 8 x 1Mb on CPU, and 2 boards of 16 x 1Mb giving
40Mb total.

The machine has two full height 5.25" drives bays, one if which is
accessible from the front of the unit.

They're quite a nicely styled machine - looking (and sounding!)
impressive. there are pictures at www.obsolyte.com

> > This is an old machine. It is in great shape. Complete with hard drives
> > of unkown condition and size. I have never had this machine running.
> > Great for a collector of older equipment. If you have any questions send
> > me email. For pickup only I would deliver in Raleigh area. I will not
> > ship. If nobody claims it it will go to the dumpster. Wife says it's got
> > to go.
> 
> What HD's would likely be with it?  That era tended to be ESDI or early
> scsi, and 300/600mb maxtors would come to mind.

SCSI. One of mine had 300Mb drives, the other had a 600 or
thereabouts. YMMV. I've shoved a 9Gb into one and it's happy.

They're fussy booters - I use a cdrom .iso image dd'd onto a 700mb
external scsi disk to install, since it doesn't like any of my cdrom
drives.

They're a 33MHz CPU. They do have those little mostek/st nvram chips - so
you may need to do something if the battery is dead (i've got one modified
as per the FAQ with a couple of AA cells wired onto it ... works fine).

Will run SunOS 4.x, NetBSD. I've booted OpenBSD but it didnt install the
bootloader correctly - that may have been my fault. Linux supposedly runs
but I haven't successfully booted it yet (will try again one day). I
believe that these were last supported under Solaris 2.4 .. i'm sure
someone will correct me if I'm wrong :)

dave.