[SunRescue] Boot prom incantations on SparcStation 4/330?

[James Lockwood]

On Tue, 6 Mar 2001, BSD Bob the old greybeard BSD freak wrote:

> I would never want a root that big, anyway.  A root should only contain
> the minimal system bin and scripts and be a hanging off place for all
> the other fs's.  I will keep the 2g fs limitation in mind, tho.

This limitation does not exist in SunOS 5.x (Solaris 2.x and above)

> Is there any kind of option for a second scsi board of some kind in
> the remaining VME slot?  Ram should probably go there, if possible,
> though.

You can't put RAM there.  The 4/330 does not bus the P2 signals between
the first and third 9U slot. 

As an aside, I think that slots 2 and 3 do have P2 bussed.  You _might_ be
able to put the CPU in the middle slot and a 9U memory board in the third
slot.  You would not be able to use a P4 framebuffer or the 3U memory
cards as slots 2 and 3 are isolated P2-wise.  Maybe.

> How does one correctly get INTO those cables?  I see a set of large
> screws on the back panel cover (two at the top and a row of three
> down the back).  I am assuming that will get you inside, or is there
> a removable side cover on the drive side?

That sounds right.  Pull off the (heavy!) sidecover and you will find
several large captive flathead bolts holding the drive brackets in place.

> Are there any other things to remember about opening it up and/or
> cleaning the guts for dust bunnies, etc?

Go over the whole thing with a shop-vac.  /x30 chassis seem to be dust
magnets, more so than other VME cases in my experience.

> On this particular 4/330 class machine, with 13W3 to a usual
> Sun monitor and type 5 keyboard, what revision OS would be
> best to run out of SunOS 4.1, SunOS 4.1.3, or Solaris 2.4?

I used a 4/330 for my main desktop for nearly a year and a half, and kept
it on as an NFS server for a year after that (this was '95-'97).  The
machine was at 40MB of memory (40 1MB SIMMs) for most of that period.

I ran both SunOS 4.1.4 and Solaris 2.4.  Both had ups and downs, but I
found Solaris 2.4 to be a better bet for NFS serving and a nice (for the
time) Motif implementation.  The CDE kits for Solaris 2.5.1 will install
on 2.4 (this is even officially supported) and give an environment nearly
identical to a "modern" version of Solaris.

The final clincher was that I wanted to use large partitions and
Disksuite, and didn't have ODS for SunOS 4.  Choose what you're
comfortable with but don't discount 2.4, with enough RAM it chugs right
along.

-James