[rescue] New Sparc5 170 Rescue Questions

[James]

At 10:36 PM 10/25/02 -0400, you wrote:
>Hello all,
>
>I too have a new hardware find today. I picked up a Sparc5 170 for very
>little money with no knowledge as to what it had in it or if it worked.

Nice box. Kinda the apex of the pizzabox non-modular systems. I have an 
SS5-85 that I upgraded to the 170 (found a mboard).

>Got it back to work and found that it seems to power up, but no
>memory/hard drive. I believe it works as the when the power is switched
>on, the PS fans and the CPU fan run, but the front light does not come
>on. I hope it is either not supposed to until POST, burned out, or not
>connected properly. The first option seems the most likely, but if
>anyone knows if that is correct, please let me know :)

No light till happy post. You could make it happy by putting in a stick of 
dram (um, may require pairs, I forget) and configuring it for no disks.

I have some drive sleds, RAM and 1 and 2 gig disks. The disks you will need 
are low profile (1 inch?) and SCA interface SE SCSI. If you want to trade 
around some parts let me know.

>It surprised me that the inside of this case was perfectly pristine, no
>dust, no scratches, it looks as if it has NEVER seen use, a hard drive,
>or memory. This seems even more confirmed by the fact that is seems to
>be 501-3059 which shipped with 0MB RAM.  So, this guy may be seeing it's
>first use by me...

Lucky bastard.

>Anyway, trying to find some memory, a hard drive with sled (not
>completely necessary as I also picked up a 411 with a 2GB drive), and
>possibly an SBUS nic for a firewall configuration probably running
>OpenBSD.  So, does anyone have any good suggestions for locating these
>items outside of eBay (already looking there).  I just want a little ram
>to confirm it works before I really try to load it up.  Right now, all I
>have is 2 IPX systems and I am looking forward to digging into something
>with a little more power :)

Yay, another SS5 may live. With enough ram this box will run Solaris 8 (or 
9 I would imagine) nicely. In fact, it feels a lot like my 170mhz Ultra-1. 
I would imagine that my Ultra might perform noticeably better if I had 
software that put a real processor load on the box. For most use though the 
SS5-170 is a nice box.

You didn't mention if it has graphics. I have a spare sbus CG6 TGX+ video 
board (pretty zippy, the best of the videos except for the premium stuff).