Troubleshooting Sun Fire Boot Issues 

I'm a retired IT Network/Firewall tech. I was never in such a hi tech orgniazation that ran Sun or anything close to it. (I mainly worked for Government all my life, money is always tight in IT budgets) This video series was an education. Explained well, no overbearing music, you always pause the video for the viewer when you're just babysitting the install or config changes. Nicely done!

Crazy this channel doesnt have 10x the amount of subscribers. Great content as always

Wooah 1,024MB of RAM, what a powerhouse! Great analysis and deep dive on working with LOM. Perhaps we'll get one of these newer Sun machines with LOM running here

Glad to see you finally got it booted. If that CPU has really been run without a heatsink, I'm not surprised it was fried.. the Jalapeno cores indeed were some hot running beasts. Sadly you're on the other side of the world.. I've got so many parts leftover from Sun's purple period that I would have gladly provided you with. Since the NVRAM is actually stored on the SCC card, getting rid of the ALOM password should have just been a matter of removing the card.. it would have complained about a lack of configuration and probably come up with an invalid (<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="0">00:00</a>...) MAC address, but it should have allowed you to log into the ALOM with default passwords. Then put the card back and use the user admin commands to reset the password. Officially, it's "not supported" to remove or insert the card with power turned on, but it usually works. (I heard that Sun patched that trick in a later version of ALOM, which simply reboots when the card is moved, but I haven't seen that live, none of my machines has a new enough ALOM version on it.)

You're conflating runlevels which are specific to the OS and the various services run by the init SMF service management facility with the rest of the system management machinery. The openboot prompt is firmware for managing and configuring the system. Think of it like EFI or your pc bios. The ALOM is literally another computer in your computer for controlling your computer. Runlevels only apply to the init. Also c0t0d0s0, controller 0, target 0, disk 0, slice 0. Slices are like partitions but written in the Sun disk label format. From an old Solaris admin, happy to see this stuff getting interest. Cheers

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="596">9:56</a> one small addition: you actually *can* hop from Solaris directly to the ok prompt but it requires a Sun keyboard (or some means to send the equivalent key code) *and* it will immediately halt Solaris until you resume. A little more background: Sun Keyboards have a bunch of additional keys not present on your average PC-AT 106 keys keyboard. One of them is a key labelled "Stop" - and if you press it in conjunction with the "a" key (so as "+") simultaneously, the machine will immediately fall into the ok prompt and Solaris will be halted - literally in between instructions to the CPU. But. *Everything* is preserved just the way it is. Each CPU register, the cache, memory contents - it does not harm a Solaris machine to press + other than it will immediately stop responding to anything - no network, no disk i/o, nothing. Solaris will literally be frozen on the spot and if you resume it'll continue just like nothing happened. Don't ask me what the clock will do, I'd have to look that up in the old kernel manuals, but generally it is quite safe, at least for a machine under not too heavy load. You can even force the machine to core dump from the ok prompt so you get an exact image of the Solaris kernel as it was in the moment you pressed + - extremely useful e.g. for forensics, if you suspect an attacker is doing malicious stuff right now you can stop him in his tracks and see what he was up to - of course he'll notice the machine became unreachable but that could also be the case if the machine suddenly rebooted for another reason... but I digress. I love your enthusiasm it reminds of the joy I had when I learned all the cool stuff you could do with these machines. I've been working with Sun machines starting 2000 right through 2017. Now I'm starting to look for my very own Sparc-based server all for myself (my wife's gonna *kill* me! :D)

You got hit with the exact same issue I had with a v245 (basically the slightly newer version of the v240) I picked up cheap about a year ago. Someone had made a mistake when they repasted the cpu, and managed to bend one pin on one cpu. Totally caused it to not want to power on. Eventually pulled the CPUs to check, found the bent pin. Straightened said pin enough to be able to get it into the socket, and came up just fine. Thankfully the 245 is sas rather than scsi, so the disks are a lot less rare these days

This is timely for me, I'm struggling with booting and bypassing the password protected LOMlite for a sunfire v100. Great stuff, learned a lot that might actually help me boot this thing.

I administered hundreds of V and E series sun machines back in the day. I've been lucky (or unlucky) enough to also have significant seat time administering IRIX, AIX, HPUX and DGUX over the years. Sun's hardware and Solaris were by far the best in class when it came to Unix. It went downhill in the later years when they were forced to compete with X86 and ultimately died at the hands of Oracle but Sun's peak was really a golden era of computing. I certainly miss it a little.

Tip: If you send SIGUSR1 to dd, it will output its current status. You can do this by getting the PID of dd, then doing "kill -10 pid" to send SIGUSR1. On a SPARC machine, apparently, the SIGUSR1 is actually 30, not 10, but that's according to the man page on my Linux machine, so who knows. You may be able to check on your system with "man 7 signal".

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="1000">16:40</a> another small remark: what you refer to as "stripes" is actually a "slice" in Solaris lingo. Slices in turn are pretty much the same as partitions used on hard disks anywhere else between Windows and other Unices with one notable exception: slice 2 (s2) will refer to the whole disk by convention. That's why you never change s2's parameters with fdisk or anything else. So in Linux, for example, you usually target the whole first disk in the system as /dev/sda while in solaris you'll have to use /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s2. In Solaris, slices can be numbered 0-8 (0-9 for intel based Solaris) with the convention that s0 usually holds the os (mounted at /) and s1 is normally used as swap space (IIRC the convention was to use half or the same amount of space as RAM was built into the machine). 2 for "all the disk" we already mentioned and the rest of the numbers can be arbitrarily used. By convention you'll often find s3 holding /export (for NFS servers), s5 = /opt, s6 = /usr and s7 = /home. By the way /dev/rdsk is another quirk of Solaris because there is also a /dev/dsk for the very same device(s). The difference is how you access the device: /dev/rdsk is character based (or "raw" access, hence the "r") so it is ideal for operations like dd. /dev/dsk OTOH is block based so it's accessed through a file system. You'll notice that in /etc/vfstab the mount devices will be /dev/dsk while for low level operations you'll use /dev/rdsk.

That is awesome, glad that you stuck with it and brought the v240 back to life! Tricky issue and a great example of where you just need to step back and talk it through with someone else.

Oh you can get back to the OK prompt, heh. You just need to send the equivalent of stop-a on a sun keyboard (assuming you haven't explicitly disabled it, anyway). That allows you do all kinds of stuff (including poke at memory).

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="204">3:24</a>, Awwwwwwwwwwww kitteh helper! 😻

Wow, dunno why youtube suddenly recommended your videos. I worked on the v240 (enchilada server or enxs) dev team back in the early noughties. A few things: it's not really runlevels... You can drop to the openboot prompt without shutting down solaris by sending a 'console break' or pressing stop-A if you have a monitor and a proper sun keyboard. At the OK prompt it's power-off (an extra dash). A single CPU config works fine, but it has to be in the right slot due to jbus termination requirements. Running without a heatsink will kill a jalapeno CPU in seconds, just like any modern big CPU.

new favorite channel 😃

Oooh! Instant thumbs-up. Keep ‘em coming.

I love this youtube channel

Great video again! Love that you pick the retro hardware specially sun. Got some retro gear here as well waiting, talking about sgi indigo 2 and indy machines. But they also need some tlc :)

i wanna see an SSD in this thing. great content!

I do not know the SUN stuff, but HP has it's own "ALOM" called "ILO". I think in 1999/2000 new servers arrived with a dedicated black box ( similar to "jetdirect" boxes) that had a ethernet port and a web server running, so you could connect to your ILO and serial console with any browser. A few years later that device was integrated on the mainboard, so there was a dedicated ethernet port allowing you to connect to ILO all the time to power cycle the server or get to the serial console. Not sure how well that stuff aged, e.g. if you need a java plugin to make old ILO versions work ...

I've been binging on your videos the past week, and I really like your channel! I actually got a Sunfire V240 like yours from an auction this week. Unfortunately, the power button doesn't power the server on. When I hooked it up to a serial cable and connect the power cable, I get the SC prompt, but any command I type is telling me that that I need to set the admin password. Unfortunately, it never takes any password I set. It acts like it has, but when I try a command again, it tells me that I need to set a password for admin again. Any ideas on what is wrong? ***EDIT: Figured it out. I opened up the top front cover, and the SCC card/Power Button/Keyswitch assembly had been unplugged. I plugged it back in, and now I am getting an OK prompt, so I should be good now!

That poor v120 is struggling with Solaris 10! It might be happier with Solaris 9 Also if you don't know, you can do "setenv diag-switch? false" to speed up the boot. The full POST test is really long on these.

Sunfight at the OK Prompt Corral…

man I am beginning to think that my v250 cpus are both dead, I have tried all different combinations and no ok prompt.... when I originally got the machine it booted into the ok prompt trough the gpu on the screen, I just didn't have the time to play around with it, but now not even trough management tty, even though I can see ALOM.....

What state are you in? I have a pair of V440s that could use a new home. They were both fully loaded, 4x cpu card with 4gb of ram on each card and all drive bays populated. Someone pilfered the CPUs from one of them so it should be considered a spares machine.

You dont have that interchange prompt with bios