[rescue] looking for: Sun Carrera 3004 VME board / advise on Sun2 disk install

[Walter Belgers]

Hi all,

I made an interesting rescue last week. a hackerspace moving to a new place
was getting rid of some old gear, including Sun-gear. 16 years ago (when it
was not yet a hackerspace) I had already rescued a Sun 2/50 from the same
place, that I got to work using a NetBSD-based boot server. (And a Sun 2/170
that I parted with, still regretting that.. it is somewhere in the UK AFAIK.)
This time, they sent me some pictures of some Sun 3/xx pizza boxes and a pile
of VME boards. Included on the pictures was a Sun 3/75, which I have been
looking for for almost 2 decades so I was very eager to pick up the stuff.

Sadly enough, the Sun 3/75 was just an empty box. I can put in a random CPU
board, but I would really like to put in a Carerra (b
3004b
) CPU board, as
found in the 3/75 (and 3/140, 3/150, 3/160 and 3/180). Itbs a long shot..
but does anybody have one to spare? It would need to be sent to the
Netherlands. Trading for other VME boards is also possible (e.g. 3/110 CPU).

Not only was the 3/75 empty, a lot of the VME boards were missing parts. From
a bunch of 8MB boards, the Am2960 chips were taken off, there were a few 3/260
and 4/260 CPU board, with the CPUbs and other support chips gone.. sad to
see. There were a bunch of TTL and ECL monitors, that were also dismantled
(broken) already.

But, to make up for that, there was a Sun 2/120 in there as well that needed
to go! Given the state of the other stuff, I was fearing the worst for what
was inside, but it looked nice when opened up and cleaned a bit. In it:
501-1004        Sun-2 Ethernet 8:0:20:1:17:51
501-1006        Sun-2 SCSI/Serial
501-1013        1M RAM
501-1013        1M RAM
501-1048        1M RAM
501-1048        1M RAM
501-1082        Xylogics 451
501-1051        2/120 CPU ROM Rev R
SC4000 SCSI bridge
QIC-11 drive
I can still feel my muscles after getting this thing down from three flights
of stairs.

After cleaning and confirming that the power worked and the CPU worked, I
started adding boards and they all seem to work as well. Typed in
K2<Ctrl-B><Enter> to trigger the Easter Egg ;-)  I took out the Xylogics (have
no drives for it) and put in a video/keyboard board I had lying around but
then the serial console stops working, so I took it out again and put in
another MB of RAM (setting the jumper to the correct position on the board).
In the case is a QIC-11 drive, with a SCSI cable that was not connected. There
is a also a SC4000 SCSI board in the case, not connected.

Slot #9 is empty, but therebs something in the back of my mind telling me
this slot is special in some kind of way. Can I just use it for any board that
just uses the P2 connector?

I would like to put a disk in the 2/120 with an OS. I took the NetBSD machine
I used as a boot server in 2002 for my 2/50, which still booted. I put the MAC
address in /etc/ethers and that was all that was needed to get the 2/120 to
netboot SunOS 4.0.3, hurray! My plan is to use this running system to format a
drive, copy all the files over, install boot blocks and that should get me a
working system. This is probably easier than making boot tapes and fixing the
capstan rubber of the QIC drive.

I connected an old SCSI disk directly to the 501-1006 board. The connector on
the bottom is the SCSI so I read. But the kernel does not see a disk while
booting, nor does the b
formatb
 command see a disk. I used proper
termination (I thinkb& controller - cable - disk - cable - terminator).

So my questions are:
- do I need a special drive for it to be recognised under SunOS 4.0.3 or can I
just use any old SCSI disk?
- do I connect the drive directly to the SCSI controller, or do I connect the
SC4000 to the controller and the disk and tape drive to the SC4000?

Cheers,
Walter.