This Old SPARC
The story of a man and his Sun SPARCstations (and an Ultra), and the trials, tribulations, and victories that go with the care and feeding of such a menagerie.
Saturday, July 29, 2000
Friday night was a decent night. The link to which I referred, a mail from the guy from which I bought Sparky, and information in the book Solaris Guide for Windows NT Administrators gave me what I needed to get the job done: sys-unconfig. This magical command backs out a bunch of networking-related settings and halts the system. I ran it, and then booted Sparky with boot -r (the -r was just for good measure), and sure enough, Sparky started asking me questions about my networking setup. When I logged in, I could ping the windows boxes that are present on my network. Sweet! There's one problem, though - I can't ping from the Windows boxes to Sparky. That's puzzling to me. Very puzzling.
My next task was to get Netscape onto Sparky. This would prove to be a lengthy process. First, I couldn't seem to FTP from Sparky out to the internet. So, I downloaded a Windows FTP product (WFTPD), and installed that. I then downloaded the Solaris release of Netscape to the machine running the FTP daemon. That done, I could FTP the file from the Windows box to Sparky. So far, so good. But wait - the file is a .gz file. That means it's gzipped. Damn, gzip isn't on Sparky. I decided to use PKZip on the Windows box to get at the .tar file that's packed into the .gz file, and then FTP the .tar file over to Sparky. That worked OK -- I could untar that file and then run the ns-install script that comes from the .tar file. Doh!! The install script needs gzip. Dammit! OK, back to the Windows box to search the Web for gzip. I went to www.gnu.org, found the .gz for gzip (heh), grabbed it, and opened it in PKZip. Doh!! Source code. I'd have to compile this thing. No way. I then did a search on the web for "Solaris and gzip". I found a site that had the Solaris binary, and grabbed that. I then FTP'd it to Sparky and ran it. Nope. Oh yeah, need to chmod +x it. Done, and it runs. Cool. Reran the ns-install script, and it ran beautifully. Started /opt/netscape/netscape. Setup the proxy settings. It Works!! Kind of. It's damn slow. So slow as to be unusable. It also hit me at this point that my GX graphics card is only 256 color, so things don't look as purty on the Sun as they do on my Windows boxes. Hmm. Anyway, time for bed.
More fun with Web Access. Today, I got up and went right back to trying to get decent Web access from Sparky. I never really succeeded. Seems like every time I click a link, Netscape starts downloading, but then stalls. If I click the link again, sometimes the page loads, but other times not. I decided to experiment with a few things. First, I tried loading pages on Sparky from his local filesystem. I did a find for *.html, and opened one of the files I found in the output (a HotJava help page). It loaded very quickly. Indeed, any local page display is fast. OK, next thing to try is loading a page from within my subnet. That means I'll need to run a Web server. Just so happens that I have one on "Sojourner", my laptop. Cool. I enabled it and set up a virtual path to the files for my personal web site that are stored on Sojourner. Tested that locally, with joy. I then went to Sparky and pointed Netscape to Sojourner. Joy, kind of. I have the same problem as when I try to access the internet, but much less extreme. Most pages load after a second click on their link, or , if the page has started loading and stalled, a click on Netscape's address line and a press of the enter key. Weird. This leaves me feeling pretty sure there's something bad in my network setup:
- I can ping from Sparky to other peers, but not from the peers to Sparky.
- I can easily browse local files with Netscape, and it's snappy.
- I can somewhat easily browse served pages from within my subnet, but it's not so snappy, and it requires some extra intervention (clicks, etc.).
- I can almost never get decent response from internet sites.
It would be nice to have "man" pages. I'm at a loss at this point, so I start trying to figure out how to get man to work. Every time I try to get help on a command, I get the message, "manual page not found". I figure this should be a simple process of updating my .profile so that MANPATH gets set. I do a find to get all the paths with "man" in them, and add the results of this to my MANPATH variable. No joy. I read a bunch of posts on Usenet to see if there's something I'm not doing, but I don't see anything obvious. OK, I'm done for now.
posted by Mike Thomas 7/29/2000 05:39:27 PM
Friday, July 28, 2000
Maybe this will help: Deja.com: SOLARIS 2.6
posted by Mike Thomas 7/28/2000 10:19:54 AM
Sparky still isn't on the network
Last night was tough. What I really need is a "Running a SPARCstation" book. However, that book doesn't exist, so I went to two different bookstores in search of Solaris admin books. Good Solaris admin books are hard to come by. I looked at a few, but ended up with a good one from Sun -- Solaris System Administrator's Guide, which gives basic information on oft-executed administrative tasks. I also bought a giant, hardback, Unix Admin book called Unix Unleashed - System Admin Version. It's about four inches thick and It must weigh 5 pounds. Anyway, it has a great section on networking, and has specific info on Solaris networking setup, which is just what I needed.
So, $100 worth of books in hand, I started messing about with various Solaris/Unix tools to configure the built-in network card. One of the first things I did, however, was to change the name of the machine from "test" to "sparky". This was easy from the command line. However (and I don't know if this is related) after doing this, I got an 'X' error message saying that device 0.0 was not available when I tried to bring up admintool (my intention was to update the hosts file to refer to "localhost" as "sparky", too). I tried to bring up another command window and nothing happened. Eventually the windowing system just locked up. I could move the mouse, but nothing responded. I was close to panicing when I remembered that pressing Stop-A at the keyboard would get me into PROM mode. I did so, and then typed "Sync", which is something I picked up while perusing all the Solaris books at the store. This worked like a charm - the filesystem was synched, and the OS rebooted just fine.
That little crisis averted, I starting playing with ifconfig and route, as directed by the book, to configure my network interface and to update the routing table. Configuring the NIC seems straightforward enough - I've done it plenty on my Windows boxes, but I was kind of guessing when using the route utility for the route table. Regardless, I did get my NIC configured correctly, or at least it looks that way. I've now got a "good" IP address associated with the card. However, no dice. I couldn't ping any other box on my network. I could ping localhost/sparky, and I could ftp to localhost/sparky, so the inetd stuff seemed to be running OK.
The last thing I tried was to run the networking configuration scripts presented in Unix Unleashed. The first script, /etc/inet.d/rootusr seemed to be a good place to start. Supposedly, this script detects your cards and sets up the appropriate config files for them. Well, I ran it, but it immediately complained that it couldn't find "shcat", which is some other script or command. Strange thing is, I couldn't find it either. I did a find from the root directory and the file didn't turn up. Now, how can Sun provide a script that configures its OS, that has a dependency on a file that's not there? At this point, I gave up. Sigh.
posted by Mike Thomas 7/28/2000 07:40:35 AM
Thursday, July 27, 2000
Set up my Sun SPARCstation 10, aka "Sparky" up last night. I don't know how to actually name the machine "Sparky" yet, but that's what he will be called once configured. Here are Sparky's vital stats as of now:
- Sun SPARCstation 10, 2x50mhz processors, 64M of RAM, 1G hard drive, Solaris 7
- Sun/Sony 20" monitor
- Sun 5c KB and mouse
Sparky is surprisingly fast, at least to me. Nonetheless, my plans for Sparky are to give him more brains (2 more processors and much more RAM, over time), and learn to make him my main machine. "Why?", you ask. Two reasons: 1) I'm tired of Microsoft's crap, and want to get acquainted with someone else's crap, and 2) Solaris is one of the more popular Unices in use at the time, and I use it at work. I'd like to know more about it. This is a good way to do it.
So far, I've spent about $540 (not including shipping) for Sparky. He was assembled from parts won in various eBay auctions. I intend to spend a couple hundred more on him in the near future. He needs more RAM for sure, and two more processors would be cool.
So last night, I placed him in the "seat of honor" at my main desk area, thus dethroning one of my other three machines. It was tough to get him placed, since his monitor weighs a good 80 lbs, and his system box probably weighs 25lbs. His monitor is so deep that it's a good 4-5 inches closer to me than the old 17" it replaces. That's OK, though -- it fits, and looks great.
The only administrative thing I've done is to set up a user for myself (it's a bad thing to log in as "root" all the time). I also played forever with colors on the desktop, etc., and considered running the OpenLook rather than CDE window manager. OpenLook is very spartan compared to CDE, but neither are as polished looking as Windows.
I haven't got Sparky connected to his peers yet. I thought it would be as simple as connecting him via a 10BaseT cable to my hub. No dice. He can't ping anyone else on the network. I'll have to research a bit to find out how to enable networking. I intend to buy a couple of Solaris references, as I'm sure I'll need them.
posted by Mike Thomas 7/27/2000 07:29:27 AM
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