[rescue] looking for: Sun Carrera 3004 VME board / advise on Sun2 disk install

[Mike Spooner]

Hi Walter,

You mentioned that you had a 3/110 CPU board, which got me thinking: I'm
looking for a 3/110 *chassis*, do you have one you would be willing to
let go of?

-- Mike Spooner

--------- Original Message ---------
From: Walter Belgers
To: rescue at sunhelp.org
Date: Sat Nov 10 18:37:56 GMT+00:00 2018
Subject: [rescue] looking for: Sun Carrera 3004 VME board / advise on
Sun2 disk install
Hi all,

I made an interesting rescue last week. a hackerspace moving to a new
place
was getting rid of some old gear, including Sun-gear. 16 years ago (when
it
was not yet a hackerspace) I had already rescued a Sun 2/50 from the same
place, that I got to work using a NetBSD-based boot server. (And a Sun
2/170
that I parted with, still regretting that.. it is somewhere in the UK
AFAIK.)
This time, they sent me some pictures of some Sun 3/xx pizza boxes and a
pile
of VME boards. Included on the pictures was a Sun 3/75, which I have been
looking for for almost 2 decades so I was very eager to pick up the
stuff.

Sadly enough, the Sun 3/75 was just an empty box. I can put in a random
CPU
board, but I would really like to put in a Carerra (b3004b) CPU board,
as
found in the 3/75 (and 3/140, 3/150, 3/160 and 3/180). Itbs a long
shot..
but does anybody have one to spare? It would need to be sent to the
Netherlands. Trading for other VME boards is also possible (e.g. 3/110
CPU).

Not only was the 3/75 empty, a lot of the VME boards were missing parts.
From
a bunch of 8MB boards, the Am2960 chips were taken off, there were a few
3/260
and 4/260 CPU board, with the CPUbs and other support chips gone.. sad
to
see. There were a bunch of TTL and ECL monitors, that were also
dismantled
(broken) already.

But, to make up for that, there was a Sun 2/120 in there as well that
needed
to go! Given the state of the other stuff, I was fearing the worst for
what
was inside, but it looked nice when opened up and cleaned a bit. In it:
501-1004 Sun-2 Ethernet 8:0:20:1:17:51
501-1006 Sun-2 SCSI/Serial
501-1013 1M RAM
501-1013 1M RAM
501-1048 1M RAM
501-1048 1M RAM
501-1082 Xylogics 451
501-1051 2/120 CPU ROM Rev R
SC4000 SCSI bridge
QIC-11 drive
I can still feel my muscles after getting this thing down from three
flights
of stairs.

After cleaning and confirming that the power worked and the CPU worked, I
started adding boards and they all seem to work as well. Typed in
K2<Ctrl-B><Enter> to trigger the Easter Egg ;-) I took out the Xylogics
(have
no drives for it) and put in a video/keyboard board I had lying around
but
then the serial console stops working, so I took it out again and put in
another MB of RAM (setting the jumper to the correct position on the
board).
In the case is a QIC-11 drive, with a SCSI cable that was not connected.
There
is a also a SC4000 SCSI board in the case, not connected.

Slot #9 is empty, but therebs something in the back of my mind telling
me
this slot is special in some kind of way. Can I just use it for any board
that
just uses the P2 connector?

I would like to put a disk in the 2/120 with an OS. I took the NetBSD
machine
I used as a boot server in 2002 for my 2/50, which still booted. I put
the MAC
address in /etc/ethers and that was all that was needed to get the 2/120
to
netboot SunOS 4.0.3, hurray! My plan is to use this running system to
format a
drive, copy all the files over, install boot blocks and that should get
me a
working system. This is probably easier than making boot tapes and fixing
the
capstan rubber of the QIC drive.

I connected an old SCSI disk directly to the 501-1006 board. The
connector on
the bottom is the SCSI so I read. But the kernel does not see a disk
while
booting, nor does the bformatb command see a disk. I used proper
termination (I thinkb& controller - cable - disk - cable - terminator).

So my questions are:
- do I need a special drive for it to be recognised under SunOS 4.0.3 or
can I
just use any old SCSI disk?
- do I connect the drive directly to the SCSI controller, or do I connect
the
SC4000 to the controller and the disk and tape drive to the SC4000?

Cheers,
Walter.
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