SUMMARY and Q: SPARC SLC won't boot

Barry Brown (bbrown@dottie.sna.com)
Tue, 13 May 1997 13:48:01 -0700 (PDT)

I don't know if this got posted to the list the first time I sent it, so
here it is again.

Barry

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Thanks to all who reponded to my question about why an SLC seemed to hang
during a CDROM boot. No one was able to answer the question directly, but
here were the responses. At the end, I have a new issue that has popped
up.

>Chuck the SLC. Doggy SCSI controller. A 386 is probably faster.

I got the SLC for a good price (free). I'm just trying to see if I can
get it up and running for the guys in Tech Support who don't have a Sun,
only Macs and PCs.

>Did the same exercise quite a while back. Had problems with the SLC
>getting hangs on the SCSI bus. Got it installed in the end though,
>after several retries. It seems the SCSI or I/O to the external
>devices might be too slow for running Solariss 2.x on the SLC.

I find the bit about the SCSI bus being too slow for Solaris hard to
believe, but I'm willing to entertain other explanations.

>Doesn't Solaris require 24MB RAM?

16MB is the minimum, I think. I have a SPARC 1 with 16MB RAM running
2.5.1. It's a light-duty mail server currently. The catch is that the
SPARC 1 is running headless (ie, no OpenWindows). It's slow enough as
it is.

>Have you checked if you are using the right CDROM?

Yes.

>or try using: boot cdrom

The SLC doesn't support that command. You have to do: boot sd(0,6,2)

>If this machine is headless ( no frame buffer ) but has a terminal (
>wyse or something ) connected to ttya as the console, try checking the
>eeprom setting for "ttya-ignore-cd" this should be set to true.

I'm not running it headless.

>I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the Kernel used up your 16 MB RAM
>right away and, not having learnt about Paging yet, just starved. A
>16 MB Machine (and SLCs can't take more RAM) running Solaris will
>never be anything but barely usable for just a few Text Mode Logins
>(remote or non-X11 on Console). Get XSun (sp?) and make it an X Terminal
>instead. 32 MB is the Minimum for a Solaris X11 Login, and *still* won't
>let you do more than run simple Stuff like Editors.

Point well taken. But I _did_ get the installation application up on
the screen once, so I know it can be done. If I can get it running, all
I'll want to do is run text-based stuff, anyway.

Even after all this, I still haven't gotten it to boot. Now there's a new
problem. Shortly after I wrote the original message, the machine lost its
Ethernet ID. Now it says "Ethernet address ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff Hostid ffffffff"
I got a new ID PROM and stuck it in there, but the MAC address is still all
f's.

How do I get the MAC address back?

Barry