sean@petvax.medcor.mcgill.ca (Sean Marrett) (06/20/91)
Two days ago I posted 2 messages to the net about the feasability of using Sun 3/50 diskless mono workstations, that had been offered to me at a bargain basement price ($600.00-$700.00) as Xterminals hosted by an SGI 4D/35 server (Using either Seth Robertson's Xkernel (seth@ctr.columbia.edu or der Mouse's nd (not quite as easy)- See the X11 FAQ)). There was some concern as to whether or not the SGI's could boot the Sun's without having the nd protocol. In fact, this turned out to be a fast alarm, unless we wished to run SunOS 3.5 on the 3/50's. After some panic, and a few late night hours with Mike Parker, (Thanks Mike), it seems clear that this can in fact be done (err - as soon as we can mount the font's - local problem, only). The major problem is to find yourself a Sun 3/XX running SunOS 4.X (preferably 4.1.1, I think). Then the Xkernel stuff should be quite nice. Although Seth refers to 4Lazy (pre-compiled Xkernel and vmunix), unfortunately it is not yet available on his ftp site (sol.ctr.columbia.edu). Two pieces of software that are very useful are on the SGI ftp server (sgi.com), namely a rarpd and an rpc.bootparamd. Useful stuff for this. Other than that, the SGI's do have tftpboot, so everything is hunky dory. A number of people requested info on our sources The folks down at the McGill CompCen (David Holmes, delphys@ocean.cc.mcgill.ca) who has done the barganooning suggested that they contact one of the following: APEX 206-867-1900 Catherine SOLAR SYSTEMS 206-869-9354 / 1-800-253-5764 Paul Cooke (unless you are at McGill, in which case you should contact him directly). What follows is the various snippets from all sorts who responded to my plea. As this message was cross posted to (alt.sys.sun, comp.sys.sgi and comp.windows.x ) as well as comp.sys.sun, the responses came in a variety of flavours. This is long, but it may be useful to some folks. It was nice to see that there are a number of sites doing the Xkernel thing. Computational Recycling ?. Now for the bulk of the messages. Thanks to: jit@slic.cellbio.duke.edu rayan@cs.toronto.edu zoo@aps4.spa.umn.edu haynes@cats.UCSC.EDU mouse@lightning.McRCIM.McGill.EDU gdmr@lfcs.edinburgh.ac.uk pomeranz@isis.dccs.upenn.edu fwp1@CC.MsState.Edu wilker@gauss.math.purdue.edu luis@rice.edu ats@phoenix.udev.cdc.com Steve.Ackerman@MSG.UVM.EDU mouse@lightning.McRCIM.McGill.EDU jmattson@UCSD.EDU jdd@db.toronto.edu steve@bigmips.tamu.edu seth@ctr.columbia.edu warren@atmos.washington.edu GAVRON@ALPHA.SUNQUEST.COM rapatel@khnphwzhn.njin.net LEONARD@Arizona.edu david@lta.lta.com rankin@EQL.Caltech.Edu stripes@eng.umd.edu ggt@fstgds03.tu-graz.ac.at IBRAHIM@EENovell2.uta.edu delphys@ocean.cc.MCGILL.CA devans@snowhite.cis.uoguelph.ca ------------------------------------------------------------------- If you are going to use it for graphics, you BETTER get a floating point processor (or a specialized display such as the SGI 3D processor.) ------------------------------------------------------------------ Yes it'll work ok, but buy the fp coprocessor (separately, around 200$?). ------------------------------------------------------------------ Buy them all, as many as you can. Wonderful use for little boxes. Sun for a while had a deal where you could trade in a 3/50 or 3/60 for a discount on an IPC. If you know anyone buying an IPC with a 3/60 discount/trade in, buy them a 3/50 and swap for the 3/60 (same discount). We run xkernel on 2 3/50's and 2 color 3/60's. Total disk space about 30Mb (mostly swap space for the 3/60's since they need to be able to have a lot of pixmap's in memory). They're fast, simple to maintain (install and that's it. no twiddling, no monkey business, just log in via xdm). ------------------------------------------------------------------ Can't answer your question, but, if the SunSet program is in effect there then the 3/50s are worth $1000 as trade-ins to Sun on new models, and you get to keep the 3/50s. We put 4MB memory upgrade kits into a couple of 3/50s (making 8MB total) and it made all the difference in the world in performance under X. So you might consider that option too. ------------------------------------------------------------------ We have a load of old 3/50s and 3/80s which we converted. They make very nice X-terminals. The server does do some FP, so it might be worth thinking about getting some 881 chips too. ------------------------------------------------------------------ As far as I know, the only thing you need to boot Xkernel (the Columbia version, that is) is tftp. I would be surprised if your SG didn't support this protocol. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Though I haven't seen it done I've been reliably told that you can boot a 3/50 from an sgi. The sgis support rarp (so the 3/50 can get its IP address), tftp (so the 3/50 can get its boot image), bootparamd so that the 3/50s can find out where to get its root filesystem and nfs so that the 3/50 can mount its root file system. Unless there is something I'm missing in the boot procedure (and I am familiar with the steps in booting a diskless workstation) that is pretty much all that is necessary. The nd protocol certainly isn't. The nd protocol is only used for booting diskless sun *2* workstations. I am sure that it isn't needed for booting diskless 3/50s since I've seen an RS6000 boot one and it doesn't support nd either. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Cheap SCSI disks of 40 megs or so cost about $200-250 US. That's big enough for a boot disk for a stripped down Unix for the Sun 3/50. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun3's do not use nd to boot. i think the person above was thinking about sun2's which need the ndbootd deamon to run. the big problem you will have is that diskless sun3's need arpd to work on the sgis to resolve their ip address and host name. if you look you will see that arpd is no where to be found on the irix distribution. irix does support the bootp boot protocol which is the one the sun3's use to boot. solve the arpd problem on the sgis and you should have no problem booting sun3's from your IRIX server. ------------------------------------------------------------------ No uglies here. I just brought up Xkernel on my 3/50 last week. I'm serving it from a 3/60. My 3/50 was modified with a 4MB add on from parity systems last year (before we found out about Xkernel). Now I don't miss the cursor locking during disk operations. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Depending on your level of SunOS, you shouldn't need nd. Nd is an outdated way to boot (pre 4.0). What you DO need is rpc.bootparamd and rarpd. Bootparamd comes standard with IRIX, rarpd you can grab from sgi.com. From my understanding, the standard Sun 3 boot sequence is: <power on> <decide to boot from network> <rarp for my address> <tftp boot.sun3 from the server who answered rarp request> <boot.sun3 does another rarp for it's address> <boot.sun3 do a couple of bootparams> <boot.sun3 mounts the directories indicated by the bootparam reply> <boot.sun3 loads vmunix> <vmunix starts running> I've attached the pertinent man page info at the bottom of this message. Now that we've established it's doable, I have to inform you that we had a Sun3 configured as such. I personally found it still too slow, but, if you can put up with that, then it probably is a good way to go. (I've deleted the man page from this response - Sean) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- As for the SGI stuff, as someone noted on the net, if you're running a recent kernel, you don't need nd. > As far as the floating Point Processor is concerned, do you think it > would make a (10% 25% 50% 75%) difference in performance ? I don't know; I have never tried Xsun without hardware FP assist. (Our servers are built with either -f68881 or -fswitch, and all our machines have 68881s.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ND went away with SunOS 3. You do not need ND to boot a Sun3 -- only tftp (which the SGI has) and NFS (which the SGI has). This is, of course, assuming that the Xkernel stuff works under SunOS 4 (at least one implementation does -- there's people here using it). > P.S. More than one respondee has suggested that we purchase a floating > point accelerator - Will that make a great difference in the speed of > Xsun ? I had thought not - Any opines ? When I still had Sun3 systems, I did use the fpa for Xsun, but only because all our machines had them. I wouldn't go through any hoops to get ones now, though... -------------------------------------------------------------------------- We have converted one Sun-3 with only 4Mb of memory to an X terminal in just this fashion, and it performs almost as well as a SparcStation 1 running X under Unix. It makes a good X terminal, but I'd caution you to check out the clarity of these aged monitors. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Oh yes, I'd forgotten -3/50s ran 4.x. I suppose if you're willing to downgrade to 4.x it'll work fine. (All our X-terminal Sun-3s are running 3.5.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is not a problem if you run SunOS 4.0 or later (4.1 or 4.1.1 recommended) on the 3/50s. Suns only used ND under SunOS 3.5 and earlier. I believe it may be possible to support diskless Suns from an IRIS, but I haven't done it. Talk to an SGI guru. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Seth Robertson <seth@ctr.columbia.edu> Basically, in order to boot the following things have to be true: (for a SunOS 4.xish booting, I'm not sure exactly what happens on 3.5 it was more like a horrible nightmare ;-) You have to run arp/rarp protocol so the machine can find its ip address You have to run tftp so that the machine can get download its boot code (I can supply the boot code) You have to run bootparams to tell the machine who it boots from. You have to have NFS so that the machine's partition can be exported. I would assume that the hard part, from your standpoint, is bootparams. I don't know of a public domain implementation of it offhand... (Also, I have not actually tried this, but everything I know says that this should work) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ND is an artifact of SunOS 3.x.. you do not need to have ND to boot up Sun 3/50s under 4.0 or above... the primary problem was that root was not booted via NFS under 3.x, and they used ND to handle it. Under 4.0, and I believe 3.5, root could be and NFS file system, so you should have no problems if you plan on running a 4.0 kernel on the Xterminal.. No one has booted off an SGI here that I know of, but I suspect it would not be a problem... just set up the binaries, configure xdm, and have the Sun tftp the kernel, in addition to NFS mounting the root parition from the SGI. If you have set up the Xterminal configuration on a Sun before, the SGI setup should be fairly easy. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Booting 3/50s off of VMS We had to do that for a while, as we had a 3/50 on the wrong side of a router. It worked fine (note: we are running multinet) We just made sure that bootp was running under multinet and that the sun's reverse arp was answered. I believe we found something in the multinet manuals on how to do it. If you want more detail, let me know and I'll have the person I work with send you something. He is the sun expert around here. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you install MultiNet on your machine, you'll find you can boot any Sun (and even run diskless Suns!) off your VMS vax... -------------------------------------------------------------------------- You should be able to boot a Sun 3 from VAX/VMS if you're running MultiNet on the VMS system. (I haven't done this myself, however I have seen a diskless DECstation 3100 boot from a VMS system in this manner.) For info on MultiNet: Sales@TGV.COM. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- We run MultiNet tcp/ip for VMS with its NFS server and client (NFS costs extra though). We have used it to successfully boot both diskless RISC/Ultrix (DECstation 5xxx) and Sun-3 workstations. We can also use it to mount VMS volumes remotely. Send email to ``sales@tgv.com'' for more info. They have some sort of trial or demo offer available. (Claimer: we've been a beta test site for the last several MultiNet releases...) --------------------------------------------------------------------------