Tag: sun

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Installing Solaris 8 for Sparc using qemu

Following on from a previous post on installing Solaris on an emulated Spacrstation using QEMU, I’ve been attempting to install on a Sun Ultra 5 with a flakey cdrom drive, and wanted to step through the install steps first on an emulated machine (since the life of the used cdrom drive I picked up from ebay may be limited).

qemu-system-sparc -M SS-20 -m 128 -drive file=sparc_sol8_2.qcow2,bus=0,unit=0,media=disk -drive file=../solaris8_sparc_disk1.iso,bus=0,unit=1,media=cdrom,readonly=on

Adding -nographics option to the above command makes things little easier, since we don’t really need the graphical installer at this point, and this more closely mirrors what I’m seeing with my attempted install on the actual Ultra 5 which I’m installing over a text terminal connected to the serial port.

After reaching the openbios prompt, booting with boot cdrom:d -vs gets you to a Single User prompt where you can continue the required steps to format the disk first, before rebooting and continuing without the -vs option.

After boot:d :

Skipped a few steps, confirming network config.

This is the step I’m interested in using as a workaround for the flakey cdrom drive. Can I mount an NFS drive containing the content of the install cdrom and install from the network? (I’ve already gone down the path of trying to setup a jumpstart/netboot config and couldn’t get the machine to find a netboot host, so that din’t turn out to be a workable option) :

I couldn’t get this to connect to my NFS share on another Solaris 10 VM, so not sure this was as useful as I thought it might be, but I could continue and complete the install anyway.

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Setting/resetting a MAC address on a Sun workstation with dead NVRAM battery using OBP (Open Boot PROM)

I had this post in draft since 2019 when I picked up a Sun Ultra 60 from ebay and needed to reset it’s MAC address because the NVAM battery had died. I never posted it apparently, probably because I only had to do it once and then forgot about it.

I had to give up the Ultra 60 when we moved from the US back to the UK – if you’ve every come across one of these you’ll know how heavy they are and I couldn’t justify the shipping costs (besides, I already had a Power Mac G5 and a Mac Pro 3,1 going in the container, which were heavy enough).

I saw a FB post recently that someone had a palette of Sun Ultra 5 ‘s for £50, so after working out some shipping, I now have an Ultra 5.

I previously followed instructions I bookmarked here but looks like that article is not up anymore, but it is archived on Wayback Machine here.

The relevant part I needed were the steps at the Open Boot Prompt to reset the MAC and System address:

01 0 mkp
80 1 mkp  < = System type.  For sun4u arch 80.  For sun4m arch - 72
08 2 mkp  <= Sun AUI is is always 08:00:20, which are the next three values for MAC
0  3 mkp
20 4 mkp
01 5 mkp <= 01:02:03 next values to append for your MAC, e.g. to generate 08:00:20:01:02:03 as MAC
02 6 mkp
03 7 mkp
0 8 mkp
0 9 mkp
0 a mkp
0 b mkp
c0 c mkp <= next 2 values are your System ID, e.g. c0:ff:ee
ff d mkp
ee e mkp
0 f 0 do i idprom@ xor loop f mkp  <= Calculates the checksum

The Gentoo wiki also has a great reference for OBP prompt commands here.

Notes on setting the MAC address also here and here.

I don’t have VGA monitor for the Ultra 5 yet, or a Sun keyboard or mouse, so I’m booting via a serial terminal right now (using my VT132) – first two steps scrolled off the screen:

After the above steps, reset-all, then your boot command depending where you are booting from,

boot disk

or 

boot net
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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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Replacing a failed CD-ROM in a Sun Ultra 60

The CD-ROM drive in the Sun Ultra 60 that I recently picked up from ebay lasted long enough to get an initial install of Solaris 10 installed, and then the tray refused to stay closed. I picked up a replacement used DVD drive from www.anysystem.com

It came with free plastic ducks. Yay!

One thing I’ve noticed is that used retro computer gear is often shipped with far more care and with better packing than new gear – good job on the packing anysystem.com:


Here’s a side view of what the Sun Service Manual for the Sun Ultra 60 calls the ‘Removable Media Assembly’, or RMA:

Here’s the front view before removing the face plate:

The front plate is removed by squeezing the left and right sides then it pops off. Remove the screws seen here on the front left and right:

… and then the whole RMA section slides out:

Undo the 2 screws on the left and right of the CD-ROM drive, remove the cables at the back and then slide it out of the assembly. Here’s the CD drive out, and the new DVD drive inserted:

RMA pushed back into place and front plate re-attached. Done!

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