I was given a pair of Sparcstation 5 machines today, and have a few questions.

They currently don't have any floppy or CD drives. For the CD side of things, I have a Plextor Ultraplex SCSI which I think should work.
However, as for the floppy, I have a spare PC floppy drive, but I have no idea if it will work.
They came with a combined scsi and ethernet card the middle sbus slot, I can't find the version number on it though.

I was also given an external 2.5gig tape drive (a tandberg TDC 4220). Apparently it takes MAGNUS 2.0, MAGNUST2.5 DC 9200, DC 9250 or equivalent media. Is there a more common name for these tapes?

Lastly, does anyone know a place in the UK selling the 13W3 to VGA adaptors (and keyboard adaptors or keyboards) so I can use a normal PC monitor.

The plan is to run linux on them, as they are running sunos at the moment, and I don't know the root (or any other) passwords.

Any other advice about running Linux on Sparcstations would be welcome... =)

In reply to:

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I was given a pair of Sparcstation 5 machines today

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You lucky git!

I've got one with a 17" monitor running Linux 6.2. Right now it's sitting in my closet, because I got a DEC Alpha to use instead. I've been looking to get rid of the Sparc for a while, but it just doesn't seem like anyone wants it. Anyway, as for the 13W3 adapter, Cables Online has them.

I've worked with Sparcs for over ten years, and I don't believe I've ever used a floppy on one. Just don't worry about it. Especially since I'm 99% sure that they use a proprietary floppy drive.

I'm not sure what you want to know about the SCSI/Ethernet card. I can tell you that those cards were very common. At the time, you pretty much had the option of the SCSI/Ethernet or a quad-ethernet card if you wanted an ethernet NIC. At the same time, I don't know if it would be a 10BaseT or a 100BaseTX NIC (which would be an le or hme, respectively, under Solaris), nor do I know the type of SCSI adapter it would be.

You can certainly use the Plextor CD drive with it. In fact, Plextor is generally recommended because it's one of the few CD drives manufacturers that always put on the option to switch the drive to 512-byte (or is it bit?) blocks, which is required if you want to boot off of it. Make sure to change this (it's usually a jumper on the back) if you need to boot from it.

Don't know anything about where to find cables in the UK; sorry.

Are you interested in keeping SunOS/Solaris on them, or do you just want to reinstall? If you want to keep SunOS, I can provide some suggestions as to how to reset the root password.

The only other suggestion I have is to consider if you really want to run Linux. NetBSD and OpenBSD might be interesting to you, as well. Most of the advantages Linux has over other free Unices get thrown out the window when you're not running on an Intel machine. (Even emptool won't build on them, as I found out earlier today.)

They currently don't have any floppy or CD drives. For the CD side of things, I have a Plextor Ultraplex SCSI which I think should work.
However, as for the floppy, I have a spare PC floppy drive, but I have no idea if it will work.

There's no place for the eject button, and Sparcs expect a software eject (basically) which is mapped onto one of the pins. The Sparc hardware FAQ probably covers whether you need to modify a standard cable, but it's not worth bothering.

I sort of miss mine (it ran Linux; the audio driver for those machines was mine) but it wasn't fast enough and I couldn't afford the next step up. Now i can but I just don't have the time to play with them anymore.

I'll forget about the floppy then... =)

The card appears to be 10BaseT as is the Onboard NIC. If they were very common that means they are likely to be supported under Linux / BSD, which is probably all I need to know about it... =)

I'd like to keep SunOs on at least one of the boxes, but I'll probably put Linux on the other. The reson is that I have a Linux Firewall / Proxy / Gateway etc at the moment (An old P133), and would like to use the sun instead (Yeah I suppose Open BSD would be more secure... =)

The current OS appears to be
SunOS Release 5.6 Version Generic_105181-04 [UNIX(R) System V Release 4.0]
Copyright (c) 1983-1997, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Any ideas for getting into the OS would be welcomed. Otherwise I'll try to get the original OS CDs from the previous owner (if they supplied such a thing?)

I think I'll skip on the floppy idea then, as I think it will be able to boot from CD with my UltraPlex.

I look forward to being able to use your audio driver... =)

What you need to do is, first, boot from alternate media. A CDROM sounds like the likeliest possibility for you. Get to the PROM monitor (press Stop-A on the Sparc keyboard or send it a serial Break, if you've got a serial terminal attached). Boot from the cdrom by typing ``boot cdrom''. If you're using the Solaris CDs, type ``boot cdrom -s'', as that will put it into single-user mode, bypassing the installation. Once you've logged in, mount the old root filesystem (of course, you'll have to be using an OS that has support for Sun's UFS; I think that Linux has such support). Then edit the /etc/shadow file and remove root's password. Unmount the filesystem and reboot. Now you'll be able to log in as root without a password and do whatever you want.

By the way, you can download Solaris for Sparc for free.

I look forward to being able to use your audio driver... =)

Little-known slick feature. It supports loading a second driver called "dmy" which will then be /dev/audio1 (/dev/dsp1, /dev/audioctl1, etc) which is like those VirtualDub things for Windows, sort of: you open it for write from a process and it just throws away the audio. However, if you also open it for read the data is looped back as if you're recording it, without ever being converted to analog.

I used to use it to record radio shows, with a cron job that fired off Real Audio player at the right times and then started capturing. And unlike typical Linux audio drivers you can actually open this driver twice, once for read, once for write, in separate processes.

I wish I had that sort of time and inclination to play around again.

The card appears to be 10BaseT as is the Onboard NIC. If they were very common that means they are likely to be supported under Linux / BSD, which is probably all I need to know about it... =)

Happy Meal Ethernet (hme), so called because you got the ethernet and the scsi all in one package.

There was also their 100meg card, which was "Big Mac" for obvious reasons. One of these days I have a Big Mac card to go in my SunOS 4.1.4 machine, and I should do that. Sigh. One of these days I should retire it.

Once the bootable Linux CD has finished downloading, I'll give that a go...
Thanks for the Solaris Link, I shall grab that too... =)

I saw the Sun Happy Meal term mentioned on a few sites, but didn't know what it refered to until now... =)

I am investigating what other hardware they might be throwing out. It looks like they will have a keyboard and mouse for me...

I use a similar feature on my Windows (boo hiss) machine. The SBLive card in it can record the mixer output, which is useful if you want to record stuff with effects applied.

I haven't used a sun machine since the Sparc classics at uni, so it's all a bit of a learning curve.

Nope. The hme is the 100Mbps version of the same thing, I'm pretty sure. The 10Mbps one is still just an le device, which is Lance ethernet, for the chip that was used on it. And the on-motherboard 100Mbps ethernet devices were also hmes, and there was no intrinsically attached SCSI adapter there (although there would be one on the motherboard, I don't think they were closely integrated like on the SBus and PCI cards).

Of course, I could be remembering incorrectly, as it's been quite a while since I dealt with 10Mbps ethernet, especially on a Sparc.

Regardless, it's all very standard stuff and you'll have no problem getting it to work under Linux.

The BigMac has no SCSI, and is 100, so the HME would be the same thing with SCSI

But yes, I think you're right and the HME is 100. The Lance was 10. I don't know what the "Quad" ethernet was.

Well, there was a quad ethernet that was the qe and the quad fast ethernet, which was the qfe. No interesting names there, it seems.

what's so great about a sparcstation?
what IS a sparcstation?

-windows user

A SPARCstation is a workstation computer that Sun Microsystems built a while back. There were many models, of which the 5 was the third most powerful, behind the 10 and the 20. They ran Sun's version of Unix, which was the BSD-based SunOS when it initially came out, but became SVR4-based Solaris soon after. You can also run Linux, OpenBSD, and NetBSD on them now. The SPARCstations are a couple of processor revisions behind now. They ran SuperSPARCs, which were supplanted by UltraSPARCs, then UltraSPARC 2s, and, recently, UltraSPARC 3s.

Many of us were weaned on Sun workstations in college (although I wasn't -- we had DECstations), and there's a certain amount of cache in certain cirles in owning one in, and there's also a good bit of nostalgia, as well.

The SS5 is probably about as powerful as a fast Pentium or slow Pentium II, although that's really comparing apples and oranges; the SPARC family is RISC-based, so there's a lot of give and take in what's faster. But it was a well-made computer, with good specs for the time. It came with SCSI and ethernet, and could hold up to two 2.1GB drives internally, in addition to its CDROM and floppy drives (not all came with all of those, obviously). Oh, and all of that fit in a box about 3 inches tall by 16 inches wide by 16 inches deep (SPARCstations were often referred to as ``pizza boxes'').

In my line of work (Solaris administrator), it's also nice to have one to play around with at home, to keep one's skills up or to have a ``spare'', so that you can experiment with things that might be questionable in a company environment.

The SS5 is probably about as powerful as a fast Pentium or slow Pentium II, although that's really comparing apples and oranges

Perhaps it was just the windowing interface we were using at the time (some Sun thing on top of X), but my lasting memory of the SS5 from uni was that they were painfully slow (even we some mech eng student hadn't left 10 finite element jobs running in the background). I had a 486dx4 100 at the time running Linux which always seemed much faster than the Sparc.

I did like them though, nice solid bits of hardware, they also had Sun Trintron monitors on them (those were the first Trintrons I saw and I haven't stopped using Trinitrons since).

That often had to do with the framebuffer (read ``video card'') in them. Most of them shipped with fbs that were crap (the CG6, IIRC), and the nicer ones were prohibitively expensive. They probably cost more than the rest of the machine combined. Which is especially unfortunate when it's marketed as a workstation. I never have understood why Sun didn't just contract nVidia (or whoever was big at the time) to develop framebuffers for them. I think some of the more recent lower-end workstations have ATI chips, but I seem to remember that they were really lowballing those.