I was just given a Mac Plus (with 4 MB RAM, it’s max). It currently has a 20 MB external disk. Would anyone be willing to give up a bigger disk (I’d really like 40 MB; it’s external 25 pin SCSI) or System 7 install disk so I could really trick this box out?
Tag Archive for 'Hardware'
It’s been a while since I last updated, which I think is because I started a full time job (as a Sys Admin at Rutgers) and I’m finishing up my last two classes of my undergraduate career (yes, it’s take long than I wanted). I think it’s also because I use twitter, which is a nice way of putting down random comnent instead of a full blow post that tends to get long winded to fill out space. I put a feed of my twitter thing on the left. Feel free to follow me if you want.
Anyway, I’ve managed to purchase a Sun Blade 2000 (specs are in the Systems tab), which has become my main desktopy workstation (I think I’m a sucker for the glowing Sun logo on the front). (Yeah, I know I could get a better x86 machine, but I don’t want to)
Erlang has once again has come up and peaked my interest. I got the Joe Armstrong book a few weeks ago and managed to compile erlang for Solaris/SPARC today (I’ve had it working on my iBook for a while now, but the previously mentioned Blade 2000 is a much nice machine to program on (read: it’s got a big screen)). If you need it for Solaris 10/SPARC, send me a message.
Installed VMS on the Alpha I got the other week. Install was straight forward, except for some problems I had with the SRM boot_osflags variable (for VMS it should be “0,0″ and not the default of “A”, which I think is for Tru64).
If anyone wants a lid from a SPARCstation 5, Aurora 2 chassis (Note the version 2, it has the cutout for the larger style cd-rom drive), send me a message.
I got a free SPARCstation 5 from smed on #ruslug and the cover was from the wrong chassis It’s funny how I recognized that it was from the newer style chassis right away. Anyway, I got a “new” lid for the Aurora 1 style chassis, so I don’t need this one.
So I swapped out the power supply with one from work. No go. I then tried changing the frame buffer. Still nothing. I ended up trying the old processor (a UltraSPARC IIi 333 MHz; the machine’s original). Success! So the UltraSPARC IIi 440 MHz went bad.
There was a Infodoc (or whatever it’s called) on Sunsolve saying certain 440 MHz UltraSPARC IIi went bad prematurely, but that tended to be within 72 hours. I guess I got one of the slightly better ones, but still no good.
So the Ultra 10 doesn’t even boot now. I tried swapping the RAM with different DIMMs and no go. I’m going to try swapping the power supply and see how that goes.
Damnit, memory on the Ultra 10 is going bad:
Continue reading ‘“triggering page retire”’
Thanks to smed on #ruslug (freenode), I have a new Sparcstation 5. It’s the 110 Mhz variant, complete with 64 MB of RAM and a 2.1 GB hard disk. What really suprised me about this machine is that it has the AFX card that no one seems to have ever seen (the AFX port only existed on the SS5 and it’s rare to find a AFX card). I previously had another SS5 and a Ultra 2, so I had a fair amount of SBUS cards to fill the other two slots.
I know I have a 4 GB disk somewhere around, going to try to find that and install an OS on the machine.
Update: I tried Solaris 7 and it was dog slow getting it installed. I fell back to good old SunOS 4.1.4 to see if the machine is working (the machine originally would have had 4.1.3_U1B).
So I finally install SunOS 4.1.4 (the last of the BSD flavored SunOSes). It wasn’t too bad, in fact the only difficulties that I had to deal with was the fact that format (SunOS/Solaris’ disk partitioner thing) on 4.1.4 deals with cylinders and blocks (versus megabytes, or hell, even kilobytes). After much pain, I realized that format has some “default” layout for some disks (namely the ones shipped with Sun boxen), which allowed me to make a sane disk layout without having to remember how the hell the cylinders and blocks worked out.
I was able to do a full install on the 400 MB disk. The full install includes SunView awesomeness, which I’m not able to experience (I don’t have a monitor on this system and am doing everything via serial console).
The last task is to get Y2K patches. Yes. Y2K. You heard me right the first time. If you know where I can get the patches for SunOS 4.1.4 (sun4m), please contact me. Everyone seems to mention them and say they are one some random ftp site, which no longer has them.
Update: I was able to find a site with an old SunSolve CD posted up (it’s contents is searchable). There I was able to get a list of patches then go to the real SunSolve and download them. My date is finally correct!
By the way, if anyone actually wants the 4.1.4 CD, send me a message, and I’ll post up the image. Someone else was kind enough to give me the image, might as well do the world a favor (if you can call it that).
Update: I’m stupid, Sun has the latest patch report for 4.1.4 on their patch site. Just didn’t look hard enough. Oh, and they still have all the patches.
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