🚀 go-pugleaf

In <35101B5F.626FB38C@math.udel.edu> Peter Schwenk <schwenk@math.udel.edu> writes:

>I'm having difficulty getting a SPARCclassic to go headless.  It's got
>Solaris 2.5.1 installed.  I was hoping that the thing would boot up
>without having a monitor or keyboard plugged in, but it won't.  The hard
>disk activity stopped way before it should have, and I couldn't get a
>hold of it via the network (ping, telnet, ftp: all no).  So it seems
>that the boot process stops prematurely when a keyboard is missing.
>Does anyone know why it would stop booting without a keyboard?

It will default to using serial port A for the console input, and should use
it for console output as well, but on-board framebuffers seem to produce
different behaviour with different systems.

>I wanted to try to plug a terminal into the A/B port, but I couldn't
>figure out whether or not an adapter was needed to split it into
>separate ports, or if it had ttya's pinouts like a normal serial port
>and ttyb's using what's left.  I can't find an adapter.

You can plug a normal serial cable straight in to use serial port A. Port B
uses spare pins so you need an adaptor cable to get at it.

>I even went so far as to play around in the NVRAM to see if I could tell
>it to ignore the keyboard/monitor, but it didn't seem to work.

You can do this. Set 'input-device' and 'output-device' to 'ttya' and they
will default to using the serial port *regardless* of any input and output
devices that are or aren't fitted.

Regards,

Craig.
-- 
            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
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