[rescue] E450 Console puzzler

[Mike Spooner]

On Thu, 11 Jan 2018 21:02:34 -0600, Steve Hatle <shatle at nfldinet.com> wrote:

>
> Subject: [rescue] E450 Console puzzler
> Message-ID: <5A58254A.5080500 at nfldinet.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> All,
>
> Thanks to Dan Sikorski and Christopher Bachmann, I'm playing with my
> new-to-me Sun E450. I'll play with it's little brother E250 later :-)
>
> I've run into something that has me stumped, however.
>
> The machine has no framebuffer. If I hook up a serial console that's
> known to work on other Suns (VT320), I get output to the screen, but no
> keystrokes are recognized.
>
> Christopher had mentioned that there was "something funny" with the
> console, and they had to run it with a Sun keyboard connected along with
> the serial terminal. Lo and behold, I plugged in a Sun keyboard, powered
> up, and I was getting output on the terminal, and keystrokes on the Sun
> keyboard were recognized.
>
> I reset all the nvram defaults. With the system working in this mixed
> mode, printenv shows input device as "keyboard" and output device as
> "screen". The startup banner does say "keyboard detected".
>
> devaliases shows the device tree I would expect, but there is an alias
> "keyboard!" with the same tree as "keyboard", but with ":forcemode"
> appended. I have not checked another of my machines (or Google) to see
> if this is normal.
>
> If the Sun keyboard is not plugged in, the login banner gives the
> expected 'no keyboard' message and that input/output is going to ttya.
> However, as I said, while I get output, I can't input anything on the
> terminal keyboard.
>
> Googling this, I come up with a reference to a similar situation where
> the problem was an "incorrectly wired cable". Since my terminal/cables
> work OK on a SparcClassic and LX, I would assume it would be OK on the
> E450, but I've been wrong before.
>
> I can certainly work with the machine in this mode to get an OS
> installed enough to ssh in, but even if it's only for my education I'd
> like to figure this one out. If anyone has any insights, please pass
> them along.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Steve
>

It might be worth executing the OBP commands:

   setenv input-device ttya
   set-default ttya-mode
   reset

*And* set the VT terminal for *software* flow-control (XON/XOFF) and to
ignore CTS.

Of course, all the other suggestions regarding checking the serial cables
and even the terminal serial-port-config are also wise, in my experience.