Hi;
Thanks again to the collective wisdom of the sun managers. I have the
SLC up and running with 4.1.3 installed off of the CD.
Before I get on to the details - one note (soapbox maybe?? :) ::
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I got several sarcastic(i.e. verge nasty) replies to this and others. This is
a disturbing trend I have noticed lately. People turn to this Mailing list for
help not sarcasm. If you can't be polite don't answer people's requests. It
isn't that hard to do -- skip what you don't want to read or answer!
I doubt there are many people on this list who haven't needed help in some
form or another and rarely have I seen a question posted without someone
saying "me to" so lets play nice shall we! Answer nicely or don't bother.
ORIGINAL REQUEST ::
-------------------
I have an SLC that is the problem child of my network. It is running
4.1.1Rev B. I have managed to get its use shifted to other machines so I can
upgrade the OS (thus fix A LOT of problems!). I put a CD drive on it and imagine
my suprise :/ I can't seem to get it to boot off the CD. I have tried every
combination of sd(,6,) and sr() that I can think of. I can get sd(,6,0) to load
something off the CD but it says "loaded file does not appear to be executible".
I suspect the EEPROM. In the dusty reaches of my mind I remember something about
it might not be possible. I just don't know though. The SLC has been here a longtime. Most the stuff with it has been lost, I have no docs on it and no boot
tapes & certainly no 4.1.3 release tape. It needs to be upgraded because it only
has a crippled amount of 4.1.1b (long painful story :( ). Am I doomed to not
be able to upgrade?? Is the only solution to buy the tapes from Sun?
Does anyone have any suggestions about CD or otherwise?
The SLC has a 207Mbyte disk and QIK150 tape. It is one of our first suns and we
still need its services but at the moment it is basically unusable.
Any help greatly appreciated.
=================================================
There solution was fairly straight forward. I found the SCSI cable had a bent
pin which caused me some trouble even after getting the solution. I did
have a EEPROM version which supported CDROM boot (ver >= 1.3) but it was not
Version 2.X which knows "boot cdrom" {believe me it was the first thing I tried}
Anyway, I used "ok boot sd(,6,2)" and it worked very well.
I got a few really good non-cd ideas from people and I have included them. BTW,
SLC's can stand alone just fine. MANY people seem to think this was not allowed.
It is. I thought about making this particular SLC a client but it is on the
otherside of a Bridge that get 64kbps (250Kbps max with compression?).
This is way to slow to work WELL. The NFS mounted partitions over the bridge
convinced me of this.
============
GOOD INFO ::
============
Dan Zambon writes ::
--------------------
I have been working a similar problem with an old 4/260. We do
not have the 4.1.3 distribution tapes, but have it on CD. I dug up
a SCSI interface board, then tried to boot the system from CD, using
the 4.1.3 distribution. No luck....
AFter reviewing my notes from this newsgroup and actually talking to
my local sun people, I discovered that
1) the problem was the EEPROM level of the 4/260. An upgrade rom
set is available from sun at no charge, if I do the install
myself
2) nobody at the sun hotline had any idea as to how to get the
rom's, what the partnumber was, etc....I have really been
disappointed with these folks.....
Bottom line: My local folks were able to get the roms for me.
--------------------------
Dan Stromberg writes ::
-----------------------
Install over the network
1) newfs a small partition on the system disk - possible what's
generally /tmp.
2) dump | restore everything on the root filesystem, to this partition.
3) /etc/installboot the boot file on that partition, so the partition
will become bootable.
4) boot off it: b sd(0,x,partition #)
5) Now you have free access to the usual root partition, and
naturally, the /usr partition (unless that's nfs mounted)
6) "ifconfig" and "route add default" (your rc's have the details) to
init the net.
7) Change /.rhosts on some machine you wish to duplicate, to accept
rsh from the SLC
8) rsh "dump" | restore the root, and then the /usr, filesystems
9) installboot again, this time with the new /boot (which will
probably be "/a/boot" or something at this time)
10) Try booting off it.
Actually, if you make many changes locally, to the stock sun config,
this can be nicer to use than installing off the cd, and making a
bunch of changes each time. Of course, it's easier if you have some
kind of external media you can boot from. I used to do this on IBM
RT's running MSD 2.6, by setting up a root filesystem on a floppy with
just enough to get the net up, and run ftp. Then I'd ftp a tar
executable onto a hard disk, and use ftp's ability to invoke a filter
on an incoming stream of data to install the hard disks.
--------------------------
Thanks to::
===========
andrews@erin.gov.au (Andrew Scarman)
"Roland Hamblin EOS" <rolandh@eos.co.uk>
eeikhey@eeiua.ericsson.se (Kevin Heagney)
Bill Hunter <bill@access.com>
Jeffrey Marans <jeff@erie.irc.nrc.ca>
dzambon@afit.af.mil (Dan A. Zambon)
jiml@uts.amdahl.com (James Latimer)
strombrg@hydra.acs.uci.edu
Millman M G <michael@postman.essex.ac.uk>
Frank Peters <fwp@CC.MsState.Edu>
Tim Beyea <beyea@ERC.MsState.Edu>
hanson@pogo.fnal.gov
David Fetrow <fetrow@biostat.washington.edu>
Matt_Mauss_-T@hqdev.3mail.3com.com
Mr T Crummey (DIJ) <tom@sees.bangor.ac.uk>
louis@andataco.com
eckhard@ts.go.dlr.de (Eckhard Rueggeberg)
bernards@ECN.NL (Marcel Bernards)
glenn@uniq.com.au (Glenn Satchell - Uniq Professional Services)
feldt@phyast.nhn.uoknor.edu (Andy Feldt)
root@mrtipc2.magma.COM (Johnny Hui)
"Roy S. Hallquist, Jr." <rhallqui@rigel.uark.edu>
dmc@cadalyst.com (Dan Christensen)
-Jim Murff
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Jim Murff (murff@irt.com) Voice # (619)622-8878
IRT Corp, San Diego, CA. Corp # (619)450-4343
System Software Engineer/System Admin. Fax # (619)622-8888
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