[rescue] A few SS10 questions

[Curtis H. Wilbar Jr.]

Jonathan Sturges wrote:
>> ------------------------------
>>
>> Message: 7
>> Date: Thu, 9 Jul 2009 02:43:53 -0400
>> From: "Earl D. Baugh Jr." 
>> To: The Rescue List 
>> Subject: [rescue] A few SS10 questions
>> Message-ID: 
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes
>>
>> 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.
>   

Any decent PC monitor from the mid 90s and up should work... if it will 
handle 1280x1024
non interlaced it should handled the Sun's 1152x900 OK.  I even sync'd 
up my old
viewsonic 7 which I think had a rating of 1024x768 non interlaced and 
1280x1024
interlaced.... I was pushing it beyond spec... but it worked... (and I 
used it infrequently
on the Sun's as I had one of the Sun (Hitachi) 19" color boat anchors 
(was I sure glad to
lose that thing)).

Have to have the right adapter... Sun and SGI (and others that used 
13W3) used different
pins for the sync lines.

I've had no problem using 'PC' class monitors on Sun's.... although I'm 
sure there are
some monitors out there that might not like it (there has to be 
considering there are
so many :-) ).

-- Curt

> good luck,
> Jonathan
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