Good morning all,

Hope this helps, sorry if it's a bit unclear its 2am :)

The 25pin parallel port you refer to on your sparc is in fact an older style
25pin serial port. This can be converted to a standard 9pin serial port
plug.

You need on your PC or what ever system A 9pin serial port or USB to
Serial(9pin), I know they make USB to 9pin serial adaptors so that's no
problem.
You also need 25pin to 9 pin converter and a null modem cable and your USB
to serial port adaptor. 

What you need to do is plug the 25pin to 9 pin adaptor into the serial A
port then plug the 9pin null modem cable into that, then plug the other end
of the cable into your 9pin serial port or USB to serial port adaptor.
Use telnet or what ever you like using the settings 9600b 8n1.

I know this works used it quite a lot on an apple to console into sparc's

-----Original Message-----
From: port-sparc-owner@NetBSD.org [mailto:port-sparc-owner@NetBSD.org] On
Behalf Of MATTHIS ROUCH
Sent: Thursday, 06 January 2005 12:31 AM
To: martin@duskware.de
Cc: port-sparc@netbsd.org
Subject: Re: Re: Re: install netbsd on sparcstation 5 with limited resources

Ok, the ones on the SS5 are the XXL version which look like parallel ports
on PCs. Which confirms that I have no serial-to-usb cable unfortunately.


-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Husemann <martin@duskware.de>
To: MATTHIS ROUCH <120580@soas.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 15:23:17 +0100
Subject: Re: Re: install netbsd on sparcstation 5 with limited resources

On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 02:18:36PM +0000, MATTHIS ROUCH wrote:
> Thanks for you quick reply. The problem is that I have no other machine
> with a serial port (just to make sure, its the very long/many pins one
> right?), nor serial-to-usb cables, so I thought there might be another
> way...?

Oops - too bad, that would be the easiest way.

Serial connectors on sparcs come in three flavours - mini DIN (8 pin?) 
connectors (round, pretty small), 9 pin sub D and 25 pin sub D connectors,
the latter look like parallel ports on PCs. I am not sure what kind the
SS5 had. For details of serial ports look at www.nullmodem.com.

Martin