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.
Friday, August 04, 2000
Well, I found out yesterday (on SunHelp.org), having sent the money for the ZX graphics card, that the card won't work under Solaris 7. Damn. Screwed up again. Contacted the eBay seller for this item and begged him not to force me to buy it. He was a prince about it, and we agreed that he'd return my money, minus the eBay commission (they charge 2.5% of the winning bid as a transaction fee).
The guy that sold me Sparky sent me another case to help in repairing Sparky's lameness (he's missing a foot, and another is cracked). In order to make use of the new case, I had to swap all of Sparky's guts into the new case. I was a little intimidated by the operation at first, but Sun has done some great engineering on these machines. The operation went flawlessly, with the help of Sun's documentation site.
I did have one problem, however. Sparky couldn't seem to find his boot disk. He was looking for device 3, which he couldn't find. (Philosophical aside - Sparky isn't really sparky any more, if you consider that the EPROM that represents his long-term memory, or lizard-brain, is part of his motherboard, and the motherboard tends to go with the case. This is why Sparky couldn't find the disk). Anyway, I took the case apart again and set the drive's number to 3. Now the drive could be found, but the mount points couldn't be resolved to the filesystems that are defined as xxt2xxxx. I hunted around for a while in the EPROM to see if there was an environment setting to say what drive to boot from, but couldn't find anything.
So, for now, Sparky is only semi-conscious.
posted by Mike Thomas 8/4/2000 12:01:07 PM
Could be useful: How much RAM is enough?
posted by Mike Thomas 8/4/2000 08:11:08 AM
Thursday, August 03, 2000
I sent the money for Sparky's new graphics card today. I'll have to research how to get the card, and especially the driver(s), installed. Once that's done, I'll be rocking with true color. I'll be sending out more money for the 64M of RAM that I recently won, too.
I had won one auction for an SM51 processor card, and was well on my way to winning another one by the same seller, when the guy who sold me Sparky informed me that I can't put four processor cards in him. Doh!! Sparky will support four processors, but only by installing 2 x 2-processor cards. So, I nicely asked the seller if he'd let me off the hook. Luckily, he was cool about it, and freed me from my obligations. It would have been a real bummer to have to resell those items.
posted by Mike Thomas 8/3/2000 07:20:47 AM
Sunday, July 30, 2000
It Works!! I finally got Sparky on the 'net. Here are the steps I took, ignoring some gory detail:
- Upgraded my copy of WinProxy to vesion 3.0, which supports Network Address Translation (NAT) services, which in the end makes your proxy machine look like a router. No more software configuration on the clients so that they know about proxies.
- Converted my windows client to test the NAT settings. Got it working quickly.
- Tried manually adjusting Sparky's networking settings, but to no avail. Decided to run my friend sys-unconfig again.
- After sys-unconfig, during which I told Sparky all about the DNS/Gateway that I'd set up via WinProxy, things were better but not yet perfect. I could resolve internet addresses like www.samoht.com using ping, but still couldn't get to them via the browser.
- As a last-ditch effort, I tried something weird - I unset an EEPROM setting that Solaris Guide for Windows NT Admins led me to believe I should set: I returned tpe-link-test to its true setting. This did it - I can browse on the web now!!
Apparently, setting it to false (as the book had seemingly recommended) made the NIC think that the physical media was faulty. Moral: don't make a setting change until you know it's necessary.
While I'm happy that it's working, I must say that I'm disappointed in Netscape Navigator's performance under Solaris. Not just speed, but functionality. I tried to post this message from Sparky (thought it would be nice to do that), but after keying the (longer) original post and attempting to publish it, nothing happened. The message didn't get posted, and I lost my text. I rekeyed the post (but shorter this time), and copied it before posting. Same problem. So, I sent the message text to myself using Yahoo mail, and posted it from a Windows box. Anyway, I'm happy to have things working now!
posted by Mike Thomas 7/30/2000 10:58:27 PM
I've won 64M of RAM on eBay, for $51. Sparky gets smarter all the time.
Also, the guy who sold me Sparky is sending a replacement case for him, because Sparky is currently lame, having one amputated foot and another, broken, one. This raises philosophical questions. Will Sparky still be Sparky after he has a new case? Would you be the same person if you had a new body? Would you be the same person if your consciousness were moved to another medium, say to a robotic body with a computer brain? Hmm....
posted by Mike Thomas 7/30/2000 06:26:26 PM
Installing the OpenLook Virtual Window Manager (olvwm). Since my graphics only run at 256 colors (for now -- I'm looking for 24-bit cards on eBay), I decided to run OpenLook (Sun's original GUI) rather than CDE (the current default GUI). Basic OpenLook (using the olwm) is decidedly stripped down compared to CDE. For example, OpenLook uses much less available colors than CDE (well, you can reduce CDE's use of colors, but then it looks crappy, whereas OpenLook looks great with few colors).
However, CDE offers "virtual windows", which means you can have several desktops in one session. That's pretty darn nice. You can set up an arrangment of apps in each desktop, and even have some apps appear in all desktops. Unfortunately, the OpenLook window manager (olwm) doesn't offer this feature by default. For that, you need olvwm. Problem is, Sun doesn't really support OpenLook anymore, and definitely doesn't support olvwm (it doesn't ship with Solaris). Anyway, I decided to snipe-hunt for this elusive beast and install it on Sparky. Having virtual windows would make OpenLook just as full-featured as CDE, without the extra garbage.
I started by searching on HotBot for olvwm. I found a binary for it pretty quickly, and downloaded it to one of my Windows boxes, then FTPd it to Sparky. The next problem was figuring out how to install it. I found a few tips on the Web, but none of them seemed to refer to things that were present on my installation. So, I decided to risk a hack. I found olwm on Sparky, and moved olvwm to the same directory. I then renamed olwm to olwm_old, and copied olvwm over top of olwm. I figured if this botched things up, I could easily boot to command-line mode and fix it. Lo and behold, I re-logged-in, and I had a virtual window manager! Schweet!! Now I'm loving my desktop. Just gotta get that 24-bit card now.
posted by Mike Thomas 7/30/2000 06:19:38 PM
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