[rescue] Ultra 5

[Carl R. Friend]

   Frank Van Damme writes:

> I finally got myself some decent Sun workstation. The beauty/beast
> in question has a 270 MHz ultrasparc 2 cpu, 128 megabytes ram and
> a 4.3 gig disk.

   Nice score.

> And, it appears to be running an old SunOS version which stops
> booting after starting some system services (ypbind etc).

   Boot the thing to standalone mode (boot -s) and nuke the NIS
(ypbind) bits.  If it's looking for something it can't see NIS
will wedge the box.  NFS will, too, for that matter if the mounts
are set up as "hard".

   Go spelunking in the world of digital archaeology for a while
before whacking it with a "modern" OS.

> So I thought about installing Solaris 9 (educational license -
> it's good to be a student). There seem to be 2 means to install
> Solaris for a single system - from cdrom or dvd or from the
> network.

   Yup.  Note that if you want full 64-bittedness you may have
to do a flash upgrade.

> Network installation supposes an allready-installed Solaris system
> as far as I can judge from docs.sun.org - the other option being cdrom
> installation, there's the problem the thing doesn't have a cdrom drive.

   Do you have *any* SCSI CD/ROM drives?  Or, for that matter, a
SCSI DVD/ROM drive?  Hook that up and give it a go.  If you have
a DVD/ROM drive and the OpenBoot bits don't grok a "boot dvdrom"
command toss the "Installation" CD into the DVD drive, yell "boot
cdrom" into the keyboard, and once it's booted shove the DVD in
and go to town.  I had to do that to my SS-20.

   Cheers. 

+------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin)            | West Boylston       |
| Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast            | Massachusetts, USA  |
| mailto:crfriend at rcn.com                        +---------------------+
| http://users.rcn.com/crfriend/museum           | ICBM: 42:22N 71:47W |
+------------------------------------------------+---------------------+