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Sun Ultra 5 Linux install issues

3

3pcedev

Veteran Member
Joined
Jun 8, 2014
Messages
735
Location
Australia
Hi all,

I've got a Sun Ultra 5 which has been sitting on a shelf for 10+ years. Last time I used it I put Gentoo linux onto it and it ran fine. 128MB of RAM installed; nothing further added to the system.

First problem I had was that the NVRAM internal battery had gone flat. I got out the dremel and found the contacts on the rear of the chip. I also drilled in further and cut the contact where it meets the battery (I didn't want the external battery connected in parallel with the internal). Soldered everything together and it now holds its settings just fine. I reset the NVRAM and entered the MAC/system ID's. No errors are reported when switching on now.

The IDE HDD inside is no longer functional so I installed a 320GB IDE drive I had lying around. I think the system picks it up fine as it complains that the 'magic number' on the HDD is wrong (which makes sense as the drive is blank).

My problems start when trying to install linux on the machine. I burned a couple of different debian versions (7.1 and the latest 9.0) for the SPARC architecture. The machine hangs when I turn it on trying to boot from the HDD; so I press STOP A then type boot cdrom. The machine then boots from the CDROM and up pops the debian installer. At the boot prompt I hit enter (default to install debian) and it then says:

Allocated 64 Megs of memory at 0x40000000 for kernel
Loaded kernel version 4.15.11
Loading initial ramdisk (14093275 bytes at 0x4400000 phys, 0x40C00000 virt).

At this point the machine locks up. Nothing will free it up (stop A does nothing) and I even tried waiting for an hour to see if it would change. Both versions of debian (7.10 and 9) do exactly the same thing.

I googled for a while on the error but couldn't find anything relevant to me. Anyone able to help?

Also is there a key combo to reset the Ultra 5 when it locks up? At the moment I am power cycling it which doesn't feel right....
 
Ok I think I have narrowed it down a bit....

It looks like my version of openboot on the Ultra 5 is too old (version 3.25). A random internet reference mentioned they needed 3.31 to install debian 7.10.

I'm struggling to find a version on the internet as all the old SUN resources have died away....
 
If you're not definitely stuck on Linux, I'd recommend either OpenBSD or NetBSD for SPARC64. I run OpenBSD 6.2 on a few SPARC64 machines, one even in production. Very stable, much faster than Linux on the platform in my experience.
 
Not really stuck on any particular OS at the moment. I managed to find a copy of Solaris 8 on eBay for pretty cheap - will give that a try when it arrives.

In the meantime I might get a copy of NetBSD and give it a try....
 
I have a Sun u5 desktop and ran Solaris 7/8 or OpenBSD for Sparc. My system has 512MB of RAM and a PCI SCSI card with a 128GB HD from what I remember.
 
A few years back I ran Red Hat 6.2, then Aurora SPARC Linux on Ultra 5's, 10's, 30's, an Enterprise E5500, and and Enterprise E6500 (18 CPU's, 20GB of RAM). Later, I ran Fedora 12 on a Blade 1000, which died a few months ago. I have a SunFire V240 and a V490 that I'm going to install something on myself.

The U5/U10 (and the 'Panther' ATX motherboard) worked pretty well with Aurora and even Fedora 12; I ran an incoming mail exchanger on Aurora 1.x for quite a while, and it handled the load nicely. You definitely want one of the supported SCSI or FC-AL disk solutions, as the CMD IDE controller in the U5/U10 is a bit odd and flakey.
 
NetBSD is the most Solaris-like modern operating system that isn't Solaris, in my experience.

You won't like Solaris, I don't think. It's still my favorite Unix, but software for it is very spensive these days. It's just not hobbyist friendly anymore.
 
zamp said:
There are Solarsis 1.x, 2.x, 7, and 8 installers at https://winworldpc.com/product/sun-solaris/ . And many other OS installers including SunOS 2.x, 3.x, and 4.x at https://winworldpc.com/library/operating-systems .
Click to expand...

The Solaris 8 installer on WinWorld is for x86 only. It says for x86/sparc but when you download it there are only ISO's for x86. Tried burning the first disk anyway and sure enough it doesn't boot on the sparc.

I've never used Solaris before so I'm interested to see what it is like. This machine is just for fun; so it doesn't really need to be functional in any way. I'll probably try linux/netBSD and whatever else I can get my hands on over time.

Might invest in a SCSI card. Now that people have mentioned it I do remember a few quirks with the onboard IDE. Is there any particular SCSI card people would recommend?
 
My ultra 5 came with a dual channel UW Symbios Logic card. I can't remember the model no though. Do these systems need a special ROM on the card? I know that particular card worked in a PC, but I was thinking perhaps it had some extra code to handle the Ultra 5.

One thing I liked about Solaris was CDE. Everything is very clear and simple, nothings shiny.
 
UW Symbios card is what I purchased years ago so its bootable. I originally purchased a different one but that was HVD not LVD.

When people were dumping Sparc Solaris I purchased a couple boxed copies of Solaris 8 release 2/04 (last one shipped I think) along with Star Office 5.2 boxed. SUN Sparc retail software was hard to find.
 
Well ive made some progress on the Sparc....

Firstly I installed Solaris 8 and successfully updated the openboot version to the latest one. Thanks to Caluser2000 for the link to the sunshack images; without them I would have been stuck!

I then played around with Solaris for a while. Everyone here was correct; solaris 8 is really not that useful in today's world... As such I figured I would move onto OpenBSD.

Before installing OpenBSD I figured I would install a SCSI adaptor and run a SCSI drive. The IDE interface on the Ultra series sucks and is very slow; plus I want to keep solaris on the IDE drive. I picked up a Symbios LSI Logic SYM22802 PCI adaptor from eBay for pretty cheap and installed it into the machine. I then attempted to install OpenBSD but it does not detect the SCSI drive....

I went into openboot and did a show-devs. The device list included the SCSI adaptor twice as it is a dual channel device. I then did a show-disks which returned two additional entries - SCSI1 and SCSI1,1. I assume these refer to the A and B channel on the card respectively.

I figured that it might require an alias before OpenBSD would acknowledge a drive was present, so I created a few aliases (disk5 through to disk11 using SCSI1@0,0 SCSI1@1,0 SCSI1,1@0,0 SCSI1,1@1,0 etc etc). Unfortunately this didn't change anything.

Observing the OpenBSD installer shows that it detects the Symbios PCI SCSI card, and it acknowledges both channels exist. Despite this when it gets to 'where to install' it says 'no disks detected'.

So my questions are:
- Did I miss a step or screw up something in the Openboot firmware setup/variables/etc?
- The Symbios SCSI card has a few jumpers. I tried turning on active termination, but there is another jumper to do with 'interrupt on A or B, or interrupt on either A or B on the same channel'. What does that mean?
- I don't think this is the case; but is it possible my SCSI drive is dead? If so is there a way in Openboot to probe the SCSI devices and return if they are present etc?
- Any other things I need to do/missed?
 
Is this the card:
LSI-Symbios-Logic-Sym22802-PCI-SCSI-Controller-Card-Adapter-Card-348-0036-%5B1%5D-12077-p.jpg


Judging by those chips running under the connectors I would *guess* that's a HVD card. Compare it to this one:

SYM22801:
Symbios-Logic-348-0036-SYM22801-2-Port-Dual-Channel-SCSI-PCI-Controller-Card-36310-p.jpg


I don't know for sure, but I would check the datasheet. The second one looks more like the one I had in mine, but I'm going from memory.
 
Sun had many HVD (High-Voltage Differential, prior to LVD just 'Differential') SCSI cards, and this does look like one of them. HVD interfaces talking to Single-ended (SE) interfaces won't work, and can fry both sets of bus drivers. Low-Voltage Differential (LVD) was designed to interoperate with SE devices.

You can tell from the icon on the external connector bracket. See the webpage at http://www.certiguide.com/aplush/cg_aph_VIIISEHVD.htm for more information and the logo to look for for HVD and for SE.
 
I feel like an idiot.... All these years and I never knew that you could hook up an LVD device to a HVD adaptor. Admittedly I don't use SCSI much; however I always thought the connectors/cables prohibited you from doing so.

Of course I have a HVD card, and my HDD has (in tiny font) printed on it 'LVD/SE'.

What are the chances I have smoked up my HDD? It never made any bad noises and there was definitely no smoke or smells. If it was an IDE drive I wouldn't care; but these SCSI drives cost $100+ on ebay :(
 
Just grab yourself a SCA drive and an adapter, they're very reasonably priced, and you can still get new ones (zero hours in the SMART counters) for good prices. They also go up to 300 GB :)

50/50 as to whether you damaged anything. I've done the other way around by accident (HVD drive on a LVD/SE card) and not blown it up.
 
Alright so I have managed to install the latest OpenBSD release on the machine.

Everything is going fine; however I am completely lost as to mounting a samba/cifs share...

The only things mentioned on the internet are using a utility called 'sharity' and another called usmb.

I can't seem to find sharity as it doesn't appear in any repositories for OpenBSD/sparc64. usmb on the other hand is there and installs, but I can't get it to mount anything. I created the config file as per the man page, however when I try to mount the share it just parrots back its version number, informs me the the conf file is available to root and then exits. No errors or anything.

Can anyone help with this? I'm so close to being able to use the machine but without mounting a samba/cifs share I can't get data onto it.....
 
Since in modern times I find free NFS clients are common, I don't use SMB for anything anymore. I have an NFS client running on a WindowsXP machine, but unfortunately don't recall any details. If you can get an NFS client working on your non-OpenBSD machines, networking should be a lot simpler, I think.
 
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