At 11:52 am 20/3/96, Davyd Norris wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>I have just been given four Sun 3/60 boxes sans disks and RAM, but with
>nice 24 bit graphics cards and 19"monitors.

Lucky guy.

>Since I am a NetBSD x86 kinda guy and the only Sun stuff I have touched
>previously  are Sparcs running Solaris and
>SunOS (not too sure about that either - I've really used all *but* Sun
>stuff for some reason, no bias intended), I was
>looking for some advice from those NetBSD-current Sun users out there.

Well, here goes...

>
>Basically, I was looking for advice on:
>
>1.  Hardware.  I have heard that these things run about as fast as a fast
>486 - true?  What RAM is required to run NetBSD
>        reasonably well, bearing in mind that I have to fill four machines
>on no money.  What is the absolute minimum RAM?

4M is the absolute minimum.  To run X with local clients (i.e. normally)
you want at least 8M.  If you can find/afford it, 12M per machine would be
much happier (they use 30-pin 1M simms in multiples of 4, mostly).

>        What about HDDs?  They have SCSI-I cards in them, so what size and
>type of disk should I get?  I want X11 and decent
>        userland real estate for playing :)

You can share much or all of userland between them.  I guess their disk
requirements are similar to BSD/x86, although I don't know.  I would say
500M for messing or 800M for compiling, roughly.  You could easily have
200M or even 100M on machines that were clients sharing stuff from the
'main' one.

>
>2.  Software.  There is currently zip on these babies, so how do I go
>about installing NetBSD?  Can I newfs the disks using
>        my existing x86 box and copy a sun 1.1 distribution system and
>-current sources on to it, them wop them into the sun
>boxes?  Is this a little overoptimistic?  Do I need a floppy drive and
>bootable image? (if I had one of those then I could ftp
>the stuff over to the new boxes.)

Personally, the way I got stuff on to my 3/50 was by netbooting.  The Sun3
PROMs can boot over le0, so set up a netbooting platform on one of your
BSD/x86 boxes.

The only thing I can't rembember is how I formatted the disk.  I *think* I
partitioned it on a Macintosh, and then formatted it from Solaris.

Cheers,

Jules


/----------------+-------------------------------+---------------------\
|  Jelibean aka  | jules@mailbox.co.uk           |  6 Evelyn Road      |
|  Jules aka     |                               |  Richmond, Surrey   |
|  Julian Bean   |(jelibean@jmlbhome.demon.co.uk)|  TW9 2TF    *UK*    |
+----------------+-------------------------------+---------------------+
|  The Other Place - n. (pop.) Depending on the affiliation of the     |
|  speaker, one of Oxford, Cambridge, The House of Lords, The House of |
|  Commons, Hell.  Draw your own conclusions.                          |
\----------------------------------------------------------------------/