[SunRescue] SPARCserver+SSA Questions (lots :)

[sparcy]

G'day rescue'ers,

I've bought the SPARCserver 1000 and a SPARCstorage Array I saw earlier this week in a
dump shop. I got to take it home for a mere 150$ (without monitor tho) which is pretty
okay I guess. (these are the same guys that sold me 2 nice sparc stations-2 for 25$)
After taking it completely apart, cleaning it up (damn there was a lot of dust in that
thing!) I got it going (this is liking starting up your own private nuclear plant,
first of all there's *lot's* of noise (it has 3 large fans) and then there's all kinds
on neat 'knight-rider' alike lights at the back - neat stuff ;^)

There's was still SunOS 5.6 on it but since I didn't know the root passwd I installed 
linux redhat 6.2(beta) on a seperate disk and booted from that, keeping the old SunOS in
tact (which is actually funny, since linux *doesn't* support Sun 4d arch's -
but it still booted and installed fine ... wierd ... although the SMP kernel doesn't 
work - it just hangs). Now I've been trying to find some info, both on the Server as
on the Array but still haven't been able to find much. The only thing that came
close was some info on Sparc Clusters (which seem to be just the same just multiple
servers with multiple array's hooked up together) on http://docs.sun.com.
There are still many questions I have tho, so hopefully can somebody answer
(some of these) or point me to some better resources ...

1. I'd love to get a manual for this thing (either online or printed), is there a
manual online at all ? (I can't even find the specs of eiter on www.sun.com),
does sun deliver just a manual for a particular (old) system, and how much would
this approx. cost ? - or even I only need a couple of pages I guess, anybody has
a manual and would be kind enough to photocopy or scan some pages (although
I'm not sure if this is okay, copyright wise) - or sell it to me ?

2. The sparc server has 4 'drawers' (basically like your clothing drawer, but
smaller, at the back, you can take them out by pulling the plastic levers)

- The upper drawer has the monitor ouput and the fiber output (which connects
  to the array), a standard A and B port, a SCSI port, a keyboard port and a UTP (TP) port.
- The 2nd drawer from above has another A and B port, another keyboard port, 2 UTP ports,
  and a scsi port
- The 3rd drawer has 3 scsi ports, IN, OUT and one without a label.
- The 4th drawer is just a platic front.

Now the 2nd drawer has those 2 utp port, (there are 3 UTP port in total) one of these ports
seems to be aliased (as in IP aliasing) to the port in drawer one. I got a network up
from both of these ports (linux also detected 2 ethernet ports) - the third UTP port
puzzles me ; there's a redish/orange LED which is always on, this LED is just sitting
next to the port. It seems that the port itself doesn't do much ; when I connected
it to my HUB, the HUB didn't recieve any signal ... does anybody know what this port
is for (and that LED) ?

Then the 3rd drawer ; when I pulled this one out I saw that it is just filled with 4
scsi harddisks, When I boot up and do a SCSI-PROBE-ALL it detects 4 harddisks, but
it doesn't detect these ! There are also 4 harddisks mounted in the front (next to
the trafo) and these are the disks that are seen by the system (so there are 8
disks in it together) - this means that the four harddisks in the 3rd drawer don't
seem to be (physically) connected to the system (?) - atleast, I'm guessing this
since there are SCSI-IN and SCSI-OUT ports in this drawer which migth suggest
this drawer is sort-of stand alone ... Anybody has a clue how this should work,
e.g. how do I connect these 4 additional harddisks to the system ? I tried putting
a terminator or the scsi port without a label with no luck. Should I get a scsi
cable and connect it from the first or the second drawer to the 3rd drawer ?

3. As mentioned, the first and second drawer have 'knight-rider' (you know,
the silly series with that black car 'kit' and that what-do-you-mean-I-can't-act?
david hasselhoff) these are green and yellow and go up and down. This looks awfully
cool but I guess they must have a purpose (I can't imagine sun constructor's going:
yeah - that looks cool! - we don't need a purpose for this! - It just look cool! :)
so what are they ?

4. On to the sparc array, I think this thing can hold up to 30 disks, there are currently
(what seems 12 disks installed in it, I guess 2.1Gig each) - The problem is that I can't
completely pull out any of the slots (there are 3) which hold the harddisks, I can only
pull it out halfways and then it's stuck (the same for all slots), So I can't verify
if there are more harddisks in the back of the slot (it's really hard to see). There
must be a trick to pull out these slots completely (given that in an emergency one
would need to replace a disk at the very back of a slot) - how does on do this ?
I tried opening up the back and removing 2 big screws there (there are 6 in total)
which seem to be related to each slot in the front but this didn't help. There are
also 2 marks (stickers) on the LCD slot (this slot also only opens up a couple of
centimeter) which seem to indicate one should press down a screw-driver in two little
holes, I tried that to to no avail) - Since I don't want to break anything I didn't
apply much force, guessing there's a trick to pull out a slot completely ... anybody
know ?

5. The sparc array boots up and goes through POST, after about 5 minutes all disks
are spun up. The display gives me a number 6229, and there are 4 lines (representing
the harddisks for each slot). Per slot, one line is blinking (and 3 are solid),
some ascii art of the LCD display :


   A               B
+-------+	+-------+	+-------+
|-------|	|-------|	|-------|
|-_-_-_-|	|-_-_-_-|	|-_-_-_-|
|       |	|       |	|       |	
|       |	|       |	|       |	
|       |	|       |	|       |	
+-------+	+-------+	+-------+
|-------|	|-------|	|-------|
|-------|	|-------|	|-------|
|       |	|       |	|       |	
|       |	|       |	|       |	
|       |	|       |	|       |	
+-------+	+-------+	+-------+
   /                /               / 



The ------ line means solid, and -_-_-_ line means blinking, so the 2nd harddisk from
the back (and I'm guessing there's a harddisk there - since I can see it, see
question 4) seems to have a problem ? yes ? Anybody know what 6229 means and 
what blinking or not blinking means ?

Also there's a LED at the back of the array ('sys ok') which is blinking (?)

6. I've been trying to find some info on the commmunication protocol for talking between
the server and the array (the fiber optic cable) - this seems to be Solaris specific,
it seems that only solaris is able to communicate with the array through specific
software (which is probably still installed on the system) - is this true ? Or is
there some way to access the array as a 'virtual' scsi bay ? (this is probably a
silly question, but I clueless to how this works)

7. The last question (finally ;-) - I gathered that support from other OS's for sun4d
arch's is pretty much lacking (Netbsd, OpenBSD, Linux don't support it) are there
any OS's out (apart from solaris) that do support sun4d ?

*Any* help on any of these questions would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers,
sparcy.