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rickyr

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Headless Server

Sparc works well as a headless server but how do I boot up without a keyboard attached.
Produces a "no keyboard" error followed by "boot device...  etc" and then a spinning cursor....I need it to run with no monitor and no keybd. So I can use it at home for research.
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rickyr

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Adjusted points to 200
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Edited text of question
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It used to boot ok with no keyboard. but I've done a few re-installs since then and now the problems has only recently appeared..

My thanks for reading this and gratitude if you can help
Ok, It seems that you have only monitor attached to your sparc machine but no keyboard. In that case on power on sparc machine will give one message that no keyboard found and after that nothing will appear on console monitor. If you have setup the
boot environ ment (in NVRAM) for autoboot then your sparc will boot up automatically.
If you have one more machine that can run the serial terminal session then you can use that as serial console to this sparc machine. For this just connect the serial cable to sparc's serial port A and set up the parameter as setup in NVRAM of sparc. Use printenv to see all the options. On serial console you will see a lot of POST messages that you may not have seen on console monitor.
Check and modify following in your NVRAM
input-device
output-device
ttya-mode
ttyb-mode
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Hi vkg...so glad someone replied at last....
I've already  set input and output-device to ttya and used a psion on the serial port. "booting [DEVICE] with args:" then I get the banner. then its spinning cursor time.to get acces back again I have to disconnect the drive to get an OK prompt on the psion then reset the varibles.
The psion works fine as a terminal in normal conditions. The sparc is for home use (no deskspace)so an extra  terminal and monitor are not an option, I don't want a keyboard for the same reason. Now this used to work without a keyboard. the only thing I can think of is that this install is not the entire distribution but an end user cluster. Surely this cant be it. Can you have a re-think? I really want you to have the 200 points. Thanks again..........Ricky.
The problem may well lie with the system installation only being an end-user cluster.
I had access to an old IPX that was not being used, so I networked it and did a re-install on this and installed the entire distribution cluster of Solaris 2.5.
After installation I added a couple of users then re-booted without a keyboard attached.
A message was output to the monitor "No Keyboard Found - using tty for input & output". Then the monitor turned black.
Gave the IPX time to finish booting. I was then able to telnet to the IPX from another sparc or a Macintosh.
It looks like it could be worth trying a re-install........Hope you have the same results I did.
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I did what Gormenghast said and it worked......
Present it as an answer and you can have the points.

GORMENGHAST ONLY

It was a bit drastic though I had to do a complete dump of the system then re-install then restore, took the best part of a day.
I hope I wont have to do that again too soon.
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gormenghast

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