You have saved me countless hours of anguish. Now I can proceed with my
work.
The answer was, as it, most of the times, turned out, simple:
Use a null modem (cable).
Problem:
I'm having problems connecting/using a dumb terminal to/with a Sparc10.
That is, I don't get anything on the terminal during and after bootup.
To free up an Sbus slot, I need to get rid of my graphics/monitor card
in my Sparc10 running Solaris 2.4 (SunOS 5.4). I'm going to connect a
vt100 terminal to the serial port A.
I've looked at this list's archives and Sunsolve for answers. No luck.
Here's what I have done so far:
According to SunSolve:
eeprom output-device=ttya
eeprom input-device=ttya
eeprom ttya-mode=9600,8,n,1,-
Disconnected the cpu keyboard.
(Sunsolve did not mention anything about removing the graphics
card. I
tried
with and without and it didn't help.)
Connected the terminal with a serial cable.
Power cycle the cpu.
Simple enough. But...
Result: nothing on the terminal and nothing on the graphics monitor,
when it was still hooked up. The machine sometimes boots up all the
way. If it didn't boot up all the way, I had power cycle the cpu after
reconnecting the keyboard and blindly set the eeprom settings back to
their original values at the OK prompt. Then power cycle again.
>From the list's archives, there have been mentions of connecting a null
modem between the cpu and the terminal. Is this necessary? I only used
a serial cable.
Also from the list's archives, users having similar problems but with an
older OS version, modified the /etc/ttytab and/or /etc/gettytab
file(s). 5.4 doesn't have these. Is there similar files in 5.4? Will
it be necessary to modify these files since upon bootup, the system
hasn't even gotten to the OS and output to the terminal will be already
needed for bootup messages?
Ted Marigomen
EDS/Philips Semiconductors