> 
> On Mon, 01 Mar 1999, rdkeys@unity.ncsu.edu wrote:
> >I have this ancient sparc dinosaur (old vme 12 slot crate with an early
> >sparc cpu in it).  My sunos tapes are full of hard errors, so I thought
> 
>   "Ancient sparc dinosaur"...hehe, if you ask me, there exist no sparcs which
> can be considered ancient or even moderately old.  Perhaps you should see the
> vax-11/750 in my storage room for a slight adjustment in perspective. ;)

Well, that would make a nice 4.3BSD box.....(:+}}.....

I just picked up a brace of vaxstations today, but on opening them up,
it appears they only have rz23 drives in them.  A biggie vax like the
750 series I have not had the fortune to run across, yet....

>   I have no explanation for your tape problem, but I would suggest trying to
> netboot your sun4 machine, if you have the network facilities to do it.  I've
> found it to be much easier.

Things are leading that way, but I always try to get everything I need
to standalone boot and install on any of my machines.  It works so well
when I throw a sun3 cpu in the box, that I was expecting it should be
possible on a sparc 4/xxx box.

>   I know of *no* pre-sun4m sparcs that aren't supported by NetBSD/sparc, with
> the possible exception of the sun4/400...and I've run just about all of them,
> and can say that, assuming you have a 4/200 (just a guess) that it'll run quite
> nicely.

It ran the miniroot nicely, even to getting the basic install, and the ftp
even worked fine.  But, it would not read the wangtek tape drive.  This
seemed strange, since an hour earlier, it had run the sun3 suite on the
same hardware (CPU change of course), and the tape worked fine.  I will
play with it some more and maybe put a standard archive scsi tape in
the box instead of the QIC02 suite with the emulex controller/converter.
It still seemed like it was not doing something right through the
emulex controller as the only problem.

Bob