[SunHELP] Sun-4/110 fine with SunOS 4.1.1, SunOS 4.1.4 panics with bad trap in update

[Barry Keeney]

    I don't have most of my Sun stuff in front of me, so most
of this is from memory...

On Sat, 7 Mar 2020, Chris Hanson wrote:

> I have a Sun-4/110 with 16MB and CG4 that Ibm using entirely diskless from a
> Raspberry Pi 3B+ running NetBSD 8.1.

     Cool, I haven't net booted a sun in 20+ years, those were 3/50's and 
3/60's.

>       It works fine with SunOS 4.1.1, but on a
> whim I tried to switch it to 4.1.4 and it panics in bupdateb with a bad
> trap exception almost immediately after showing the console login prompt.

    Could it be bad OS media? You have something else besides 4.1.1 you
could try? 4.1.3? Solaris 2.x?

    Have you tried multiable boots to see if it's crashes at different
points? If it's crashing always at the same point it might be bad software
when loading something after the console session starts, different points
more likely hardware.

> Should I just assume flaky ancient hardware? (Ibm sure the system is at
> least dusty, it probably hasnbt been opened since it was manufactured in
> 1989.)

   Could be, but it's it running fine on 4.1.1 less likely to be hardware.

   Tried to boot to single user? does it crash?

>   Or should I assume NFS issues and set up a local SCSI disk for it? (I
> suppose that would be faster for building software anywaybespecially if I
> set up a second disk just for swapb&)

    Going local would remove both NFS and network from the picture. If it's
working then it's something over the network for sure,

    Adding more hardware could introduce more problems, if you're going to
try a local disk, I'd start with one get it working with 4.1.4, you can
always add the second disk later.

    Building software is always going slow on this beast, better to have 
something on NetFlix ready to pass the time :^)

    I should dig out my sun's and play, althought I Don't have a 4/110.
I've got most of the 4 series desktops...

Have fun!

Barry Keeney
Chaos Consulting
email barryk at chaoscon.com

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