🚀 go-pugleaf

Sparc-Red-Hat <Sparc-Red-Hat@vm.com> writes:

>Here's an interesting bit...

>I have a Sparc IPC I use for light webhosting (www.obsolyte.com). So,
>this evening I decide I'm going to make a few more hardware hacks to it
>so that it can continue it's duties.

>As the machine runs headless, I was interested to learn from the Sun FEH
>that by changing the jumper of shunt J0710 on the motherboard (the
>jumper is located near SBus Slot 1) from pins 1&2 to pins 2&3, I can
>"turn off" the video going to the built in 13w3. Thinking it'll do
>something good for me, I opened up my IPC to perform this change.

>Imagine my surprise to discover that I don't have such a jumper at all!
>It's not just somewhere else on the board, it doesn't seem to exist on
>my machine. All the other major components match the diagram in the FEH.

>So, what's up with that? Did Sun decide to drop this in later runs of
>the IPC? Or is the other way around, and my IPC is so old it doesn't
>have it? I hope no one tells me I have to cut a trace. I was really
>hoping for a jumper. Hmmm. Perhaps this can be set in the NVRAM?

Why do you want to turn off the video anyway? With no Sun keyboard connected
the default console device is the serial port, not the built-in framebuffer.

You can even force the machine to always use a serial console device by
modifying the 'input-device' and 'output-device' settings in the NVRAM so
they both say 'ttya' or 'ttyb' depending which port you want to use. Note
that you need an adaptor cable since the IPC's and IPX's used 8-pin miniDIN
connectors for the serial ports.

--
            Craig Dewick. Send email to "cdewick@lios.apana.org.au"
  Point a web browser at 'http://lios.apana.org.au/~cdewick/sun_shack.html' to
    access my archive of Sun information and links to other places. For info 
          about Sun Ripened Kernels, go to "http://www.sunrk.com.au"