Category: Kev’s Blog

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Installing SunPCI 1.3 software on Solaris 10: x86 PC single board computer in a SPARC machine

The SunPCI single board computer is an interesting piece of hardware. This was a self-contained x86 PC on a single card that could be installed in Sun Ultra machines, that along with supporting software allowed you to install any operating system that required x86 hardware and run it on your Sun SPARC machine alongside whatever you were natively running on SPARC, such as Solaris.

Rather than x86 emulation, this approach provided a real x86 CPU and everything you’d expect in a typical PC compatible machine, all on a single card.

I recently picked up a Sun Ultra 60 and was lucky that it came with a SunPCI card. After I did a fresh Solaris 10 install, I needed to find the SunPCI software and drivers which didn’t come with Solaris 10. I Googled for a while and found a link to an FTP site that had the SunPCI software… trouble is this was a couple of months ago, and I’ve since gone back to try and find the same site to include a link but I think the site has recently gone down…

The official product manuals are still available and can be downloaded from Oracle here:

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/F24621_01/index.html

Getting started with the install steps, I cd’d into the folder after I’d untar’d it, and then ran pkgadd -d to start the install:

After the install completed I got this error that the SunPCI driver was not installed:

cd into /opt/SUNWspci and run ./sunpci – this tells you to run sunpcload to load the drivers:

This error about not finding the .2100 driver files is mentioned in a few posts, and most suggest (like here) to just symlink the missing filename to the same corresponding named .280 files like this:

Now it starts up and prompts to create a new C: disk image:

Create a disk large enough for whatever you’re going to install:

Booting up the card, you can see the hardware specs from the BIOS screens as it boots up – this is a v1 (I think) SunPCI board with and AMD K6 at 300MHz:

The mounted cd-rom drive appears in the SunPCI machine as drive R:, so cd’ing into the root of the Windows 95 cd install cdrom here, and run setup.exe to start the install:

Windows 95 starts running!

After Windows 95 install, install the SunPCI drivers for Windows 95, these are to support the onboard video, etc on the SunPCI card :

At this point I have Windows 95 running on my SunPCI card! Apparently you can either run with a monitor connected directly to the VGA output on the board, or run within Solaris in a window sharing the same display. I haven’t tried the dedicated monitor option yet, I’ll look into this next!

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SSL certs upgraded, Docker images upgraded, ready to go!

I had to renew my SSL certs for this site, so while doing so I upgraded and addressed a few other issues.

First, apparently when I deployed the SSL certs last time I missed out some of the root certs in the chain. The vendor I used gives you each of the root certs individually and you need to manually concatenate them together yourself. More in another post on the steps I too to do this.

Since certs are part of my nginx Docker image, I rebuilt my image upgrading everything to latest versions. Since it was a also a couple of years since I last did this, I also had to go back through my posts here to work out the steps I took to deploy last time. I’ll post another update on the steps I took for this also later.

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Possibly my oldest source code, Sinclair BASIC from 1983 (and my original ZX Spectrum manual)

As everyone is receiving their shiny new ZX Spectrum Next computers from the successfully funded Kickstarter (that I’m kicking myself now for not backing), I’ve dug up my original copy of my ZX Spectrum BASIC Programming manual from 1983.

The ZX Spectrum was my first home computer, on which I had my first experience of programming. 37 years later, I’m a software developer still coding every day, and still fascinated with software development.

Although flipping through the manual itself is a historical treasure trove, there are a couple of pages which are possibly my first snippets of source code:

I’ve no idea what this was that I was working on (a question and answer game of some kind?), but it’s weird looking back at what was quite possibly some of the first code I wrote, 37 years ago.

Other hand written notes that are interesting, it looks like I was keeping a wanted list of games:

I don’t remember getting a joystick interface until much later, but I was keeping notes on available interfaces at the time. 16GBP for a Kempston joystick interface? Wow!

Plus some notes for a few games, Lords of Midnight, and some other games that I can’t remember playing:

Waiting now for the promised next production run of Nexts, and this time round I definitely plan to get one!

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nginx and php-fpm configuration errors

Moving an nginx install from Ubuntu 14.04 to 18.04 and upgrading to more recent versions of nginx, php, php-fpm, I ran into this error in my nginx config:

2020/02/28 04:45:47 [crit] 11784#11784: *1 connect() to unix:/var/run/php7.2-fpm.sock failed (2: No such file or directory) while connecting to upstream, client: 192.168.x.x, server: , request: "GET /index.php HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://unix:/var/run/php7.2-fpm.sock:", host: "10.x.x.x"

The “No such file or directory” error is talking about the nginx connection to the php7.2-fpm.sock, rather than the file the GET request is for.

On closer look at where the .sock file is located, this was a subtle error to find and fix, but the fix was simple as I was pointing to the wrong path.

In my nginx default config, I had this line (migrating from a config for an older nginx and pphp-fpm version, this is where it was before):

fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php7.2-fpm.sock;

… I was missing a /php/ dir in the path, so changing to the correct path was the fix:

fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
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