[rescue] Sun Netra X1 musings

[Magnus]

Not sure if anyone else here has one of these.

I got one to set up as an OpenBSD firewall.  It arrived today.  Just to 
see if it would work, I tried two different flavors of Linux on it. 
Aurora gets stuck trying to initialize the ethernet ports.  Ubuntu gets 
further but has no driver for the IDE controller.

Yes, this is another one of those blasted IDE Sun boxes. For what this 
machine is going to do, that's just fine.  It's cheap, it runs cool, and 
uses very little power.  I'm happy with that.  I just wish it were a 
little better supported by alternative OS's.

The OpenBSD CDROM gets stuck very early on.

I'm thinking this thing is a real turkey.  I've not spent much time with 
it yet so that gut instinct may be arrived at prematurely.  I *want* to 
be wrong because despite its anemic hardware (or perhaps because of it) 
it's the perfect server for light one-off applications that should 
really run on their own hardware but not something that is worth any 
money. :)


For your amusement:



ok boot cdrom
Res
LOM event: +0h11m37s host reset
etting ...


Sun Netra X1 (UltraSPARC-IIe 400MHz), No Keyboard
OpenBoot 4.0, 512 MB memory installed, Serial #50711696.
Ethernet address 0:3:ba:5:cc:90, Host ID: 8305cc90.



Executing last command: boot cdrom
Boot device: /pci at 1f,0/ide at d/cdrom at 2,0:f  File and args:
OpenBSD IEEE 1275 Bootblock 1.1
..>> OpenBSD 4.0 (obj) #1: Sat Sep 16 23:33:01 MDT 2006
     deraadt at sparc64.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/sparc64/stand/ofwboot/obj
: trying bsd...
Booting /pci at 1f,0/ide at d/cdrom at 2,0:f/bsd
2578824 at 0x1000000+3252920@0x1800000+941384 at 0x1b1a2b8
symbols @ 0xfff64200 42/
[stuck here]