[rescue] Hello

[Jon Rouse]

I thought I would introduce myself, as I have just joined this list. I
know very little about Suns, although I did set up a sparcstation 2 as a
network maangement station about 12 years ago - we have about 600 WAN
sites on our network, so they take a bit of managing.

I have just rescued a few sparcs from our skip, and haven't a clue what
they all are, so would be grateful for some help and advice. The list is
as follows:

Four boxes labelled "Sparcstation 20". These appear to have a video card
in the back and one of them has an additional SCSI/Ethernet card as
well. One of the four comes up with a message "memory address not
aligned" at boot. I managed to install the RedHat version of Linux on
one of them, after adding an external 4Gb drive (I got three of these).
One of the others I know the password for, and it has 192Mb of memory in
it and is running sunos 5.5.1.

There are two boxes labelled SparcServer 20, these have no video card,
and two cards with what look like G703 interfaces on them. These have
UltraSparc processors in them. Presumably I will have to attach a
terminal to these to gain access, as they have no floppy disk drive or
cd drive. What happens if I can't find a password for them?

I also rescued an IPX and five add-on boxes for it, one is a CD, one is
a QIC drive, two are DAT drives and one is a hard disk. I haven't fired
this up as yet.

My particular interest is genealogy - I've installed the LDS 1881 census
CDs on an ASUS PIII box running the Mandrake distro of Linux, but can
only access this from a Windoze machine using samba, as the app doesn't
seem to work under wine. I'd like to get the LDS PAF working as well,
but under wine it loads, but I cannot edit entries.

I guess my first question is, do I try and build one decent machine,
with all the storage connected aand as much memory as I can load, or do
I have half a dozen machine with a few Gb on each?

Jon
-- 
Jon Rouse