[rescue] SparcStorage Array

[Walter Belgers]

Hi,

On 14 mrt. 2015, at 10:44, Walter Belgers <walter+rescue at belgers.com> wrote:
> I rescued a SparcStorage Array 100 with a couple of disks, which fits
nicely
> with the sparcserver 1000 I have. (I have plenty of old disks lying around
to
> fill it up.) Does anybody have a manual for it? I cant find it online.


It's taken a longer time than I had anticipated due to personal
circumstances, but I finally found some time to play around with
my Sparc Storage Array.

I had already gotten
- the SSA,
- disk brackets from a friendly rescue-reader,
- SSA software from a friendly rescue-reader (for Sol2.4/2.5),
- fiber sbus card from eBay,
- fiber from eBay that was the wrong type, and
- (somewhat later) the right fiber from eBay.

So today I decided to start to get serious. I took a SPARC box from my
pile of TODO boxes (that I havent worked with yet) and hooked up a
CD-ROM player and a laptop to get to the serial port.

First step: figuring out which gender changers, null-modem adapters and
terminal settings to use. Then I got a prompt. I couldn't however
get to boot from CD-ROM. Tried another player, still no success.

Put away the box and took another SPARC box from the pile. No disk, so
found one from the box of disks. This one did boot from CD-ROM so I set
out to install Solaris 8, only to find out that requires 64MB of RAM and
the box only had 16. I have enough memory, but wasn't really looking
forward to rummaging through more boxes of junk.

Put away the box and took a SS20 that I had filled with all kinds of stuff
years ago. It booted but the NVRAM was empty. It had Solaris 9 on disk
but wouldn't boot due to an empty NVRAM. So I took out the soldering iron,
sawed off the old battery and put on a new one. Reprogrammed the NVRAM
and booted. Also I put in the fiber card (I had to take out a
gigabit nIC as there was no free slot - there's 2 ROSS CPU's in there plus
SCSI/ethernet, multi serial, a framegrabber and a VSIMM).

SPARCstation 20 MP (2 X RT626), No Keyboard
ROM Rev. 2.25R hyperSPARC, 288 MB memory installed, Serial #12238574.

Since I took out the NIC, I didn't have network. I didn't even see
le0 in the ifconfig -a output. Then I remembered the plumbing work you'd
had to do in the old days. Plumbed and it worked. (Although after every
reboot, le0 needs to be manually plumbed - have to look into that later.)

I didn't have 'ssaadm' nor a soc device. Got the SUNWssad, SUNWssadx and
SUNWssaop packages from a Solaris 9 CD and used pkgadd to add them.

Next problem:
# ssaadm -v fc_s_download
Bootpath =
Found 0 FC/S Cards
Complete

So no FC card found. There was a 'soc' in the prtconf output ("driver
not attached").

An hour worth of googling later (not being helped by Oracle having
removed/replaced all kinds of usefull stuff) I found the solution:

# devfsadm -c disk
Apr 16 21:54:42 unknown soc: soc0: port 0: Fibre Channel is ONLINE

Succes! \o/

# format

AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
       0. c0t1d0 <SUN1.05 cyl 2036 alt 2 hd 14 sec 72>
          /iommu at f,e0000000/sbus at f,e0001000/espdma at f,400000/esp at f,800000/sd at 1
,0
       1. c0t3d0 <SUN1.05 cyl 2036 alt 2 hd 14 sec 72>
          /iommu at f,e0000000/sbus at f,e0001000/espdma at f,400000/esp at f,800000/sd at 3
,0
       2. c2t1d1 <SUN4.2G cyl 3880 alt 2 hd 16 sec 135>
          /iommu at f,e0000000/sbus at f,e0001000/SUNW,soc at 1,0/SUNW,pln at a0000000,74
121
       3. c2t2d0 <SUN2.1G cyl 2733 alt 2 hd 19 sec 80>
          /iommu at f,e0000000/sbus at f,e0001000/SUNW,soc at 1,0/SUNW,pln at a0000000,74
120
       4. c2t2d1 <SUN2.1G cyl 2733 alt 2 hd 19 sec 80>
          /iommu at f,e0000000/sbus at f,e0001000/SUNW,soc at 1,0/SUNW,pln at a0000000,74
121
       5. c2t2d2 <SUN2.1G cyl 2733 alt 2 hd 19 sec 80>
          /iommu at f,e0000000/sbus at f,e0001000/SUNW,soc at 1,0/SUNW,pln at a0000000,74
122
       6. c2t2d3 <SUN2.1G cyl 2733 alt 2 hd 19 sec 80>
          /iommu at f,e0000000/sbus at f,e0001000/SUNW,soc at 1,0/SUNW,pln at a0000000,74
123
       7. c2t2d4 <SUN2.1G cyl 2733 alt 2 hd 19 sec 80>
          /iommu at f,e0000000/sbus at f,e0001000/SUNW,soc at 1,0/SUNW,pln at a0000000,74
124
       8. c2t3d0 <SUN2.1G cyl 2733 alt 2 hd 19 sec 80>
          /iommu at f,e0000000/sbus at f,e0001000/SUNW,soc at 1,0/SUNW,pln at a0000000,74
120
       9. c2t3d1 <SUN2.1G cyl 2733 alt 2 hd 19 sec 80>
          /iommu at f,e0000000/sbus at f,e0001000/SUNW,soc at 1,0/SUNW,pln at a0000000,74
121
      10. c2t3d2 <SUN2.1G cyl 2733 alt 2 hd 19 sec 80>
          /iommu at f,e0000000/sbus at f,e0001000/SUNW,soc at 1,0/SUNW,pln at a0000000,74
122
      11. c2t3d3 <SUN2.1G cyl 2733 alt 2 hd 19 sec 80>
          /iommu at f,e0000000/sbus at f,e0001000/SUNW,soc at 1,0/SUNW,pln at a0000000,74
123
      12. c2t3d4 <SUN2.1G cyl 2733 alt 2 hd 19 sec 80>
          /iommu at f,e0000000/sbus at f,e0001000/SUNW,soc at 1,0/SUNW,pln at a0000000,74
124
      13. c2t5d0 <SUN1.05 cyl 2036 alt 2 hd 14 sec 72>
          /iommu at f,e0000000/sbus at f,e0001000/SUNW,soc at 1,0/SUNW,pln at a0000000,74
120
      14. c2t5d2 <SUN2.1G cyl 2733 alt 2 hd 19 sec 80>
          /iommu at f,e0000000/sbus at f,e0001000/SUNW,soc at 1,0/SUNW,pln at a0000000,74
122
      15. c2t5d3 <SUN1.05 cyl 2036 alt 2 hd 14 sec 72>
          /iommu at f,e0000000/sbus at f,e0001000/SUNW,soc at 1,0/SUNW,pln at a0000000,74
123
Specify disk (enter its number):

# ssaadm -v fc_s_download
Bootpath =
Found 1 FC/S Cards
Opening /devices/iommu at f,e0000000/sbus at f,e0001000/sbusmem at 1,0:slot1
Found an FC/S card in slot:
/devices/iommu at f,e0000000/sbus at f,e0001000/sbusmem at 11
Detected FC/S Version: 1.52 for
/devices/iommu at f,e0000000/sbus at f,e0001000/sbusm1
Complete

Now all that's left to do is format and mount everything and put in
a lot more of disks.

Thanks again to the people that have helped.

Walter.