[rescue] E450 Console puzzler

[Steve Hatle]

Digging back into my email, Christopher related:

the terminal attached to the E450 had an issue and we configured it for a normal keyboard, using the terminal for only output.  I am not sure now if it was the terminal or the E450 with the issue as one of the terminals that I rehomed had an issue that resulted in a failed loop-back test

I guess I need to figure out how they did that :-) Been a long time since I've dinged around with OBP and NVRAMC...

Steve

Steve Hatle wrote:
> All,
>
> Thanks to Dan Sikorski and Christopher Bachmann, I'm playing with my 
> new-to-me Sun E450. I'll play with it's little brother E250 later :-)
>
> I've run into something that has me stumped, however.
>
> The machine has no framebuffer. If I hook up a serial console that's 
> known to work on other Suns (VT320), I get output to the screen, but 
> no keystrokes are recognized.
>
> Christopher had mentioned that there was "something funny" with the 
> console, and they had to run it with a Sun keyboard connected along 
> with the serial terminal. Lo and behold, I plugged in a Sun keyboard, 
> powered up, and I was getting output on the terminal, and keystrokes 
> on the Sun keyboard were recognized.
>
> I reset all the nvram defaults. With the system working in this mixed 
> mode, printenv shows input device as "keyboard" and output device as 
> "screen". The startup banner does say "keyboard detected".
>
> devaliases shows the device tree I would expect, but there is an alias 
> "keyboard!" with the same tree as "keyboard", but with ":forcemode" 
> appended. I have not checked another of my machines (or Google) to see 
> if this is normal.
>
> If the Sun keyboard is not plugged in, the login banner gives the 
> expected 'no keyboard' message and that input/output is going to ttya. 
> However, as I said, while I get output, I can't input anything on the 
> terminal keyboard.
>
> Googling this, I come up with a reference to a similar situation where 
> the problem was an "incorrectly wired cable". Since my terminal/cables 
> work OK on a SparcClassic and LX, I would assume it would be OK on the 
> E450, but I've been wrong before.
>
> I can certainly work with the machine in this mode to get an OS 
> installed enough to ssh in, but even if it's only for my education I'd 
> like to figure this one out. If anyone has any insights, please pass 
> them along.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Steve
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