Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of paulmitch
paulmitch

asked on

Sparcstation 1+

Hi,

I have just aquired a sparc 1+.  Whilst I know quite a lot about PCs running Linux and Solaris, I have no idea about Sun hardware.

The machine currently has 28MB RAM and a 230MB SCSI 2 Disk.  No floppy drive or CDROM.

When I try to boot the machine, it does a small amount of stuff, but stops as it tries to bind to the yellow pages server, but can't as I haven't got a network tranceiver and don't have yp running on my network server anyway.

I have a copy of Solaris 7 for Sparc, and according to Sun's website, it will run on a sparc 1.  However, they state minimum system requirements as 32MB RAM.  Does this mean it will be very very slow on 28MB RAM (I know it is a slow computer anyway...) or does it mean it will not run at all on 28MB RAM?

In bios (which I'm very impressed with comapred to PC bios by the way...) I have looked at the boot options and there is no 'boot cdrom' option listed.  If I put in a SCSI CDROM drive, will I be able to install Solaris from it?

If not, how do I get Solaris onto this machine?  
Am I better off running an older version of SunOS if I can get hold of it?

Any ideas welcome.  If I can get a network tranceiver, how easy would it be to install over the network from a Linux box?  Can I set a Linux box up to be a Sun installation server?

Sorry to ask so many questions in one go, but I suppose to anyone which experience of Sun hardware, they are pretty easy.

Many thanks,

Paul
Avatar of paulmitch
paulmitch

ASKER

Adjusted points to 150
Adjusted points to 250
1. boot -s  will boot into single user mode where you can switch off NIS
2. adding a network interface is simple, just plug, reboot and configure with ipconfig
3. BIOS on SPARC is completely different to PC (i386) BIOS
4. AFAIK 28MB are to few for Solaris 7
5. pluging a SCSI device (CDROM or whatever should be easy), you also can boot from it
Oh yeah, did I mention I don't know the root password!  The machine was given to me (it was going to be chucked out, and I was told nothing about it.)

Thanks for the help so far.

Paul
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of djve
djve

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
there was a trick to reset the password in NVRAM, somehow, sorry forgot how ...
Thanks,

I got it running with a clean install.  I did:

boot sd(0,6,0)

with the correct block size on my scsi cdrom drive.

Happy Christmas,

Paul