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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.

Thursday, August 10, 2000

Sparky has a disturbing habit of being unable to see the internet if WinProxy is ever restarted on my proxy machine, such as when I reboot it. That's strange -- I thought "the network is the computer", and therefore, it seems that a given Sun box on Solaris should be pretty robust when it comes to networking stuff. My Windows clients can deal with this situation transparently. I have to reboot Sparky before he'll see the gateway again.
posted by Mike Thomas 8/10/2000 07:53:14 AM

Sunday, August 06, 2000

Sparky is back to life. It was simplicity itself. All I needed to do was reset the drive back to target 2, and then, in the EPROM do a "setenv boot-device=disk2". Now Sparky's lizard-brain looks for disk2 and the disk is disk2.

With Sparky back to life, it was now time to play with some things. First on the list: get an XWindow server to run on my Windows boxes. This would allow me to access Sparky through something other than telnet. Of course, there's not much to access on Sparky other than simple XClients like xload and xterm, but what the hell -- it would still be fun. So I searched around for an XWindow server, and found MI/X from MicroImages.

Installing MI/X was very simple. The install onto Sojourner (my laptop) took about 30 seconds. It wants to reboot your machine, but really doesn't have to (I wonder how many Windows products want to reboot, but don't have to?). Anyway, the only trick is that MI/X doesn't "bootstrap" your connection to the machine running XClients. You've got to run telnet to get that started. So, I telnet'ed into Sparky from Sojourner and exported Sojourner's display: "export DISPLAY=sojourner:0.0". Then I ran "xterm&". To my glee, I found an xterminal running under MI/X on Sojourner. now that xterm was running under MI/X, I could start other programs from X. I played around with different XClients for a while, and finally decided to run the big test: Netscape. This would be cool. Run Netscape on Sparky with its output redireced to Sojourner. Cool, but useless (after all I could run Netscape on Sojourner, too).

MI/X running on Sojourner (Dell Laptop)

Anyway, it worked like a charm! Netscape actually looks better running under MI/X than it does on Sparky?!?. Part of it is the color depth, I'm sure (Sojourner is 24-bit color).
posted by Mike Thomas 8/6/2000 02:10:57 PM



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