[SunRescue] SparcStation Voyager Serial Port Strangeness

[Ken Hansen]

I have a Voyager, and I agree with Bill's comments from his earlier post).

RAM is *impossible* to find. When I got my Voyager, I made sure it had the
Max RAM, HD space dould be gotten easily enough, but RAM was the sticking
point.

The HD is a 2.5" SCSI drive - these were made in densities of up to 1.2 Gig
AFAIK, but there are available drives that are thin IDE notebook drives,
with IDE <-> SCSI converts bolted onto them for (relatively) high prices -
$400 for a 6.4 Gig "kit" from www.powerbook1.com (I got one of these for my
SPARCBook 3GX, very nice), or Tadpole is selling out of 12 Gig drives in
trays for the SPARCbook for $650 (IIRC - Bill posted this to the sparcbook
list a few days ago).

I have no battery for the unit, and to be fair, I wouldn't use it if I did.
I think the run time on th ebattery was just short of reasonable :^(

There is a place in California (Silicon Salvage) that was selling
replacement Compact Keyboards - I snapped up an extra, as that is a part
uniqe to the Voyager, and a very likely candidate for failure down the
road -I'd suggest grabbing one of those.

Solaris 7 is the last release of Solaris to support this machine - the
docs.sun.com website has the installtion books online, detailing the
Voyager-specific install concerns (IIRC).

My Voyager is, for now, a shelf-queen - I will use it, but I got it for the
sheer "geek factor" of it. I also have the 60 MHz CPU, but since mine was a
production model, I have OpenBSD running on it without incident.

You may want to see if you can update the OpenBoot PROM - pre-production
worries me. If someone has a program for copying the OPENBOOT prom off my
Voyager and a way to burn replacement PROMs, it would probably be worth it.
That may be why you can't access the serial/PCMCIA slots...

HTH, good luck, let us all know what you come up with,

Ken

----- Original Message -----
From: "Harry J.Regan" <harry.regan at usa.net>
To: <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2001 7:26 AM
Subject: [SunRescue] SparcStation Voyager Serial Port Strangeness


I just picked up a super clean Voyager with the color LCD panel-- cool
machine.  This particular machine has a few interesting quirks.  It's PROM
reports that it is a "pre-release XTerm prom, not for a production system".
It also has no hard disk.  Where the disk should be is a odd 2.5" by 3/8
inch
double-daughter card sort of thing-- I have no idea what that puppy is.

I booted it on Solaris 7 from an external disk and it comes up jus' fine.
The Voyager has a single serial port and a PCMCIA carrier for two cards.  I
noticed that the serial port does not initialize properly.  You can "see" it
from Solaris, but it won't connect to anything.  The same is true if you
plug
a modem card into the PCMCIA slot-- Solaris says it's there, but you can't
read the modem config or connect through it.

I figured that maybe hardware support for the unique parts of this beastie
were discontinued by the time Solaris 7 came along, so I booted it off of a
Solaris 2.6 disk (the oldest verion I have lying around) and got the same
results.  I tried to boot OpenBSD 2.6, but it panics and dies.

I put an RS232 monitor on the serial port and if I'm just sitting at an OK
prompt in the PROM, the monotor shows the correct status lights lit.  When
Solaris begins to boot, ALL the status lights go out-- it's like it ceases
to
be a port at all.

Are there any Voyager owners out there?  What OS are you running and how are
your serial ports?

P.S. Anyone got any leads on the proprietary memory chips the Voyager uses?
Running X on a 60 MHz machine with 16 MB of RAM is a character-building
experience.

___________________________________________________________________
---- Harry J. Regan
---- Phone: 202.310.2719
---- FAX:   212.202.3923
---- harry.regan at usa.net



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