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NVRAM replaced in Sun Ultra 60, but no longer booting

I picked up a “new” (new old stock most likely since I don’t think these chips are still manufactured, and haven’t been for 10+ years) NVRAM timekeeper chip since the one in the Sun Ultra 60 I picked up cheap on ebay was dead. Luckily it seems to still have charge and is keeping the host id and mac address values between power off/on, so that’s great.

To reprogram the hostid and mac address that are stored in the NVRAM memory, following the guide here which seems to be the definite source for reprogramming Sun NVRAMs, I used the following steps to reconfigure the new chip. The value of 80 on line 2 is the machine type for Ultra models:

1 0 mkp
80 1 mkp
8 2 mkp
0 3 mkp
20 4 mkp
c0 5 mkp
ff 6 mkp
ee 7 mkp
0 8 mkp
0 9 mkp
0 a mkp
0 b mkp
c0 c mkp
ff d mkp
ee e mkp
0 f 0 do i idprom@ xor loop f mkp

The odd thing now is I’m running into this issue that I didn’t see before:


I’m not going to type in all this text so it’s searchable, but here’s the text for almost the same error (same issue, different version of Solaris perhaps?) :

Hardware watchdog enabled svc.configd: smf(5) database integrity check of:    
 /etc/svc/repository.db
 failed. The database might be damaged or a media error might have prevented it from being verified.  Additional information useful to your service provider is in:
 /etc/svc/volatile/db_errors
 The system will not be able to boot until you have restored a working database.  svc.startd(1M) will provide a sulogin(1M) prompt for recovery purposes.  The command:
 /lib/svc/bin/restore_repository
 can be run to restore a backup version of your repository.  See
   http://sun.com/msg/SMF-8000-MY for more information.
 Requesting System Maintenance Mode
 svc.configd exited with status 102 (database initialization failure)

If I could get to a single user logon prompt then I could follow these instructions to repair, but the above error is just looping continuously, so I’m unable to do the repair.

When I first installed Solaris 10 from CDs, I got through the first couple of disks and then the cd drive would just eject any disk inserted, and won’t stay closed. I managed to complete the install by copying across ISO disk images and completing the install from those.

Since I can’t get a physical install cd to stay in the drive, I’m not sure I can boot recovery, so I’m kinda stuck. I think it’s time to pick up a replacement cdrom drive (might as well get a dvd drive) otherwise I’m kinda stuck in the water with this machine at this point.

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cal-heatmap with more than 6 heatmap ranges

By default cal-heatmap supports 5 ranges of values for the heatmap colors, so this config:

[10,20,30,40]

will give you the ranges:

  • 0 to 10
  • 11 to 20
  • 21 to 30
  • 31 to 40
  • > 40 (the 5th range)

If you attempt to define more than 5 ranges, cells in the 6th range and above will just have a default background color. In my www.spotviz.info app I tried to create 6 ranges, so the darkest color is for > 6000. On 9/28 and 9/29 (and the other blank dates in October in the screenshot below) have values more than 6000 but are showing as the default color:

The config I had for this was:

legend : [10,100,2000,4000,6000]

The ranges I was expecting from this config was:

  • 0 to 10
  • 11 to 100,
  • 101 to 2000
  • 2001 to 4000
  • 4001 to 6000
  • > 6000

Changing this to 4 values configuring 5 ranges fixed this issue:

legend : [1000, 2000, 4000, 6000]

Posted on

Revisiting my spotviz.info webapp: visualizing WSJT-X FT8 spots over time – part 7: Redesigning to take advantage of the Cloud

Update following on from part 6.

I completed some of my planned updates recently, in particular moving the AngularJS static content to AWS S3 to serve as a static website, and then also updated AWS Route 53 to point www.spotviz.info to the S3 bucket for this front end content, and then api.spotviz.info is pointing to a VPS running the REST backend. At the same time moving the frontend to S3, I also spent a crazy amount of time migrating to use Webpack to build the frontend, which I covered here.

I’ve now started to pick up some enhancements to the app. The first enhancement is to add a new heatmap to show spots per hour, as a drilldown feature from the heatmap per day. What surprised me at this point is how crazy the original MongoDB query looks now it’s been a couple of years since I was last playing with this. Luckily the update to do counts per hour is only a minor change from the counts per day, so should have that complete soon.

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Replacing GoDaddy’s free Workplace Email with Email Forwarding

For a number of years since I’ve had my kevinhooke.com domain registered with GoDaddy, I’ve taken advantage of the free domain email that came with your registration. Apparently this service is now being discontinued, leaving you the option to pay for Office365 email through GoDaddy as their replacement, or taking your business elsewhere.

Included with you domain there’s also the option of ‘Email Forwarding’ :

Checking in GoDaddy support online here, it looks like at least for now you can replace your hosted email with email forwarding, so your incoming emails to your domain email addresses can be forwarded elsewhere (like GMail):

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