Gregory's Serverwrote a little FORTH program to update the contents of the IDPROM, and it looks like it has a valid host id now.
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142 comments
 forgot to add that i needed to do a "set-defaults" and a "setenv diag-switch? false" uh oh, RAM parity error. i'm hoping U676 isn't seated all the way and that it is an easy fix. @tubetime I like how "WARNING" is all caps and "panic" is kept on the down-low with no caps. I guess 'panic' has another meaning than what is coming to mind. that did the trick. the SIMM sockets were very stuck. welcome to S O L A R I S! spoke too soon. another parity error, this time at U677. why there? because that's where i moved the module that was at U676. think i will just pull that bank of RAM for now. @tubetime you just need to port solaris 10 to it and then as long as the memory error is not in kernel memory the process would be killed and the location blacklisted. it seems to run with 12MB RAM. no more parity errors this time. but now the installer hates my SCSI drive (a ZuluSCSI). filesystem creation failed for / 🤔 i bet it is this issue. basically the ZuluSCSI returns values for disk geometry that somehow confuses the Solaris partition tool. one solution is to use a real SCSI hard drive and then dd it over to the ZuluSCSI once the install is completed. https://github.com/ZuluSCSI/ZuluSCSI-firmware/discussions/122#discussioncomment-4418076 @tubetime damn, I wonder if it’s some kind of Mac-compatibility that’s breaking on SPARC?  Many years ago I wrote a little tool called "scsi-ping" which gives you a working disktab entry for a SCSI disk. It's still out there somewhere. zululog.txt has the smoking gun: [996859ms] WARNING: Host used command 0x1A which is affected by drive geometry. Current settings are 63 sectors x 255 heads = 16065 but image size of 2097152 sectors is not divisible. This can cause error messages in diagnostics tools. i think the solution here is to resize the disk image file so it is divisible by 63*255*512. @tubetime This all reminds me of my days with @Migueldeicaza helping him port Linux (him the kernel, me the rest of Red Hat) to the SPARC. The hardware had some idiosyncrasies but we USUALLY found them to all have fairly good reasons. Usually. My favorite thing was getting Linux to install to one from tape. AFAIK I’m the only person to ever do that. that wasn't the solution lol :blobsweats: there's no more zululog.txt error but the superblock isn't getting written correctly. 6D B6 DB 6D is the test pattern written by the format command. could be somehow corrupting it during the write? @tubetime this FF is suspiciously looking like high-Z.  @tubetime 6D B6 DB is a worst-case test pattern for MFM encoding, so the NAND flash chips in your SD card must not have enough timing margin for the channel code. well, I broke down and put in a spinning rust disk. the installer is much happier now and is copying files.  spinning rust refuses to boot when the SCSI ID is set to 0. I can set it to 1 and it will boot partway but the fstab is configured for 0 so it won't work. I imaged the drive using the ZuluSCSI initiator mode, but even with the ZuluSCSI the firmware refuses to boot from SCSI ID0. weird.  @tubetime the one part of the spinning rust drive you didn't want it to emulate @tubetime might not be helpful, as it’s a fairly different machine, but I recently watched this video of someone getting a SPARCclassic up and running off a bluescsi v1, and they seemed to have a good reason to use scsi id 3 https://youtu.be/SMz2y-wdbzs @tubetime I have a vague memory of some early Sun stuff usurping SCSI ID 0, but can't recall the details.  so i tried placing a drive image at SCSI ID 3 and *it boots as SD(0,0,0)vmunix* wtaf lol. seems like Sun cheated and swizzled some SCSI IDs around. anyway. trying an older Solaris installer and it is really surprised at the date -- could it really be 10,405 days after 1995?  @tubetime the network is the computer, and the computer is a time machine  @tubetime yeah so external drives used to ship with all the little jumpers off (ID=0) and if you plugged that into your Sun4 it wouldn't boot and then you'd call the service department ... so they wanted to make the main disk some other ID but everyone assumes the boot volume is sd0 ... so some evil genius came up with this plan. The *good* external drives had a little pushbutton wheel thingy on the back to change their ID :-) SunOS 4.1.4 says it can't possibly be the year 2023: "WARNING: preposterous time in filesystem -- CHECK AND RESET THE DATE!" sorry SunOS, there's nothing i can do to fix 2023. @tubetime I booted a NeXTstation in Sep 2022 and just had to check whether I tweeted this preposterous message or tooted it. Didn't know SunOS does it too!  @tubetime I agree with the sun engineers. Why is something with a 20MHz CPU and 1gb of spinning rust (probs not the original, much more likely to ve 500MB) even powered on in 2023? @tubetime The best bit about this message is that I guarantee you there are still Sun4s in production somewhere.  @tubetime yours was the best account on Twitter, and now it’s the best account on Mastodon. Entertaining, and educational. Thank you for existing. @tubetime I've been putting off replacing the nvram in both my ipx machines :(  @tubetime Oh, yeah, that rings a bell, zero and three are swapped in Sun4 ...  @tubetime Isn't the boot drive SCSI ID set to 3 on early Sun systems?  @tubetime also you're more brave than I would be. I'd install SunOS 4, especially with only 12MB RAM. (I ran Solaris 2.5.1 back in the day, but it was on sun4u machines with at least 128MB RAM!)  @tubetime owo... i hope you saw @ncommander 's #Solaris livestreams... @tubetime Thanks for that! @tubetime Brings back happy memories. Should get my pizza box SparcStation out of the loft and see if it still works. Was running RH Linux last time it was fired up because I didn't have Sloaris installation media. @tubetime I had to do this for my lunchbox machines (an IPX and an LX) But for my Sun Blade 100, I had to do a whole different thing to recover the IDPROM of the three machines, only the IPX got a modern IDPROM replacement. The others have CR2032s with holders hacked in. :o( (though not the Duct Tape Special you had!) |
@tubetime ahh!! Boosted because of #Forth! Haven’t thought about it for a long time. Used to use it a bunch a long time ago. Once had a function named “exist”, later wrote a loop: “do I exist” … Simple pleasures.