[rescue] A few SS10 questions

[Mike Shields]

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Jonathan Sturges
<jonathansturges at yahoo.com>wrote:

> > From: "Earl D. Baugh Jr."
> > Folks,
> >
> > We had, well "many" power outages yesterday with a crazy rain /
> > lightning storm.  I came home to find all sorts of stuff down and in
> > weird states.
> > (and yes, Surge protectors and UPS helped numerous machines weather
> > the storm so to speak... but pretty much everything ended up turning
> > itself off...)
> >
> > So, all I'm left with now are my 2 SS10's that I'm trying to reboot.
> > One seems to come up ok... but it waiting for some NFS shares from the
> > other.  The other, well
> > I"m not sure if it survived as of yet.    Thus the questions.
> >
> > General info:
> >
> > 1) Green LED on the front of the case, doesn't light up.  Could simply
> > be burnt out after oh these so many years.  I know it was spotty a
> > couple of times in the past,
> > so not sure I can rule out either.
> > 2) A keyboard plugged into the machine beeps and the various lights
> > light up.
>
> I don't really deal with sun4m machines anymore, but someone here probably
> has the Secret Decoder Ring for the keyboard LED flash patterns.  They do
> mean something, and if you're getting no love on ttya, then at least the
> LEDs might provide a clue.
>
> > 3) Tried to monitor boot process. Got the cabling fine, but come to
> > find out, none of the monitors I "THOUGHT" would sync up, do.  For the
> > one SS10
> > that does start to boot, has working green led on the case, and
> > triggers the "Mode not supported" on the monitor.  The one with the
> > problems,  which is a SS10 LX
> > (the one with the built in video card, that uses VSIMMs) doesn't even
> > trigger the "Mode not supported"... but with the type of video it has,
> > not sure if that's apples-to-apples
> > comparison.
>
> Many of those frame buffers are fixed-frequency types that you probably
> need an older Sun monitor for.  For awhile, I was keeping one of those Sun
> 20" CRTs (the Sony GDM-20E20, IIRC) b/c it worked with the old frame buffers
> as well as multi-sync PCs and newer frame buffers, and it would be the right
> thing for what you need.
>

I had a SS20 recently that I thought was dead, until I left it on for
several minutes in it's "dead" state - I had it loaded up with 512mb of ram,
and diag-switch? was set to true... It just took that long to get through
enough diags to init the console (IIRC, for the first 30% of the wait time,
there wasn't anything on the tty either).

Just a thought. I also have at least one spare SS10 (non-LX) if you need it.
(Michigan, USA)


-- Mike