I also happen to have a SPARCserver 4/470 w/ 128MB of ECC RAM. I once upon
a time had access to an older copy of SUN/OS that I was installing on it,
however I kept having problems with it being able to successfully write to
disk. I tried a number of different disks, without much success. I think
the SCSI card is busted.

Anyhow, in my talking with various other people I found out that the 4/470
used a different type of MMU. Apparently this is the cause of non-support
of the 4/470 (and I think the 4/490 as well...). I thought I had read that
Net 1.5 had added support for this MMU, but I haven't had the time (work
and school), or the disk space on my other boxes, to attempt a remote
install of NetBSD. I had previously attempted to remote boot OpenBSD and
found that it Watchdogs rather nicely ;-). 

I had also heard that people were having a hard time getting the on-board
Ethernet to work. Someone told me this may have been related to the
complications with the MMU, however, I don't know why that would be the
case (unless the problems with the MMU were creating a "phantom" bug in
the ether support...). It may just be that the Ethernet is also
non-standard in this particular class of boxen.

If I can get my hands on some old SUN/OS again, and have the opportunity
to get a new SCSI board, then I don't see why it wouldn't be fun to try
and reverse engineer how the MMU and ethernet work. I mean... someone was
using this box with SUN/OS before, so I imagine it works... somehow...

Sam Wilson

On Mon, 4 Dec 2000, David Bonnafous wrote:

> I don'y think so because in
> http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/sparc/hardware.html we can read :
> 
> Network interfaces: 
> 	10 Mbps Intel 82586 ethernet, on-board (4/100 and 4/200, may
> 	not be working properly on 4/400) and VME card (ie) 
> 
> and I use the same configuration (rarpd, bootparamd, ..., nfsd) for my
> SPARCstation 370 (and others) and it is OK.
> 
> David.
> 
> You wrote (in your message from Monday 4)
>  > Are these problems possibly in any way related to the issues I was having with my 4/110 (that I
>  > haven't messed with since I managed ta bum an IPC?) They look mighty similar, tho what I finally
>  > ended up with was NFS mounting failing...
>  > 
>  > David Bonnafous wrote:
>  > 
>  > > ***************************
>  > > *************** the 470 log
>  > > ***************************
>  > >
>  > > Sun SPARCsystem 400.
>  > > ROM Rev 3.0, 96MB memory installed, Serial #3574.
>  > > Ethernet address 8:0:20:9:70:C8, Host ID 24000DF6.
>  > >
>  > > [...]
>  > > root on ie0
>  > > nfs_boot: trying RARP (and RPC/bootparam)
>  > > ie0: TDR detected a short 0 clocks away
>  > > nfs_boot: client_addr=10.0.0.101 (RARP from 10.0.0.1)
>  > > ie0: DMA underrun
>  > > ie0: DMA underrun
>  > > ie0: DMA underrun
>  > > ie0: DMA underrun
>  > > ie0: DMA underrun
>  > > nfs_boot: timeout...
>  > > ie0: DMA underrun
>  > > nfs_boot: timeout...
>  > > ie0: DMA underrun
>