Grex Hardware Conference

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Grex Hardware Item 36: Sun2 and Sun3 scsi. Booting from imbedded scsi as primary drive
Entered by choke on Tue Apr 14 04:17:46 UTC 1992:

Well, I wanted this to have it's own item to limit drift and clarify points.

I have stated that sources at Sun claimed that imbedded scsi will not work
on a Sun 2.  STeve and other reasonable people have asked 'why?' since the 
sun has a scsi-1 bus, what could be the problem short of software support?
 
I did some looking around and finally got word from someone who is using 
SCSI on a sun/2.  How? Well let me tell you what I found out.

I called sun on a number of occasions looking for information on operating 
systems for the Sun 2.  I was told many things, the gist of which was that
the last version of SunOs that was cut for the sun 2 was 4.0.x something but
that it was a terrible memory hog and it also did not work with the old
'letter revision' roms.  I.e. you had to get the roms that were revision
1.0 or greater (which were 128k roms instead of the old 64k.)  Also
in this information was that the new roms were not made for anything but the
Sun 2/50, a VME machine.
Thus indicating that the last versions of SunOs that is usable on 2/120 and 
2/170s would be 3.5.

I have since found out that much of this information is not accurate.
Despite the fact that it came from Sun employees, it is almost totally 
inaccurate.

Sunos 4.0.3 does work on 2/120s and 170s, and supports imbedded scsi.
It works well enough to be used on a regular basis by someone I am 
communicating with via email currently.  I am arranging to recieve an
archive tape copy from him so that I may install it on my test system.
I will be setting up the system on a scsi drive as well.
This person indicated that he was using rom revision 'R', which I have one
cpu board that is also of.  The majority of my CPU boards are rom revision
'N' which I believe grex is also.

The obvious advantage here is that scsi is easier to use in the event that 
GREX hardware is exchanged for something more powerful later, say a sun 3 or
EISA 486, as compared to the SMD drives which also dissipate around 140 watts
of energy each, not including the power supplies.

I will post updates and developments in this item as they occur.

8 responses total.

#1 of 8 by mistik on Tue Apr 14 04:55:09 1992:

I agree, SCSI is the way to go, that's what I do.

#2 of 8 by steve on Tue Apr 14 13:51:20 1992:

   Yup.

#3 of 8 by choke on Wed Apr 15 01:29:02 1992:

There is a SCSI-SMD card in misc forsale for $75.
It controls up to 4 SMD drives.

For use on a sun I would assume that one would need to get a SCSI supporting
OS first, as it is unlikely (as is the case with the Adaptec acb4000) that
sun directly supports it.

#4 of 8 by steve on Wed Apr 15 15:38:04 1992:

   We have one of these now.  Just have to figure out how to use it.

#5 of 8 by choke on Sat Apr 18 18:30:52 1992:

Apparently you can use that on later SunOs versions.
I have seen them referred to as being in use on Sun 3s.

#6 of 8 by mcnally on Mon May 4 05:23:16 1992:

  4.0.3 probably wouldn't be well-suited for grex's needs because of its
prohibitive memory requirements.  Otherwise, there are some nice things
in SunOS 4.[blah] that aren't in 3.5..  We're still running 3.2 here, though.

#7 of 8 by flak on Sat Sep 5 21:13:53 1992:

 
  Sun gave you the runaround because they don't like have old machines in 
service.  They simply do not wish to support them.  Sun offers fairly nice
upgrade packages to facilitate the removal of older product lines.

#8 of 8 by mistik on Sat Sep 5 23:18:37 1992:

Is that a new marketing trend?

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