[rescue] New to me IPX

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 15 Feb 2005, Chad Fernandez wrote:

> Does this necessarily mean that the HD was wiped during decommissioning?

Most likely, yes.

> How likely would the machine have been set up to net boot?

Probably not that likely.  If you have a hard drive in the machine,
you'll want to store enough of the OS to boot up and have swap.  Many
machines of that age had /usr on a remote filesystem because of their
tiny internal drives, though.

> If I do a printenv the boot-file value is blank, do I need to specify
> a boot file?

I'm pretty sure it defaults to /unix or /vmunix if it's blank.

> Does an online resource exist that would tell me about the various
> values and functions in Openboot?  I've been poking around in it, but
> I get the feeling like I'm only seeing part of it.

OpenBoot is a fairly complete Forth programming environment.  For just
hacking around with the Forth part of it, any ANS Forth reference will
do.  For using it in the context of a boot monitor, here's the Sun
documentation:

   http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/coll/216.1?q=openboot

Unless you feel like setting up a net-boot server, you'll probably want
to find a Sun-compatible SCSI CD drive (pretty much any of them with a
blocksize of 512byes or a jumper that can select between 2048 and 512)
in an external box and boot from the CD drive.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke   )   "Let me hear you make decisions
Elgin, TX          (     without your television."
USA                 )        --Depeche Mode, "Stripped"