At 7:50 -0800 3/28/99, Steve Roylance wrote:
>Hi there, I just joined the sun3 mailing list.
>A fried of mine has a sun 3/80 that isnt doing anything, and
>I thought it would be a good project to get it up and running.
>It has 16MB of ram (Im pretty sure) a color monitor, mouse, kb, etc.
>It is lacking a hard drive, though, and therefore is without an OS.
>I don't have access to SunOS, and NetBSD seems to be the only OS
>that supports it anymore.
>I have a Linux machine that I can run bootp (or rarp) and tftp on.
>Can I boot it off of this?

Yes, you should be able to do that, although as I understand it, there are
some extra pieces of software (rpc.bootparamd) that the Sun 3/80 ROMs will
want to talk to that Linux doesn't have turned on by default.

>Shold I buy a Hard drive for it
>(I assume its just SCSI, I can get a few hundred MB drive for cheap)
>or can I run it NFS-root from the linux machine?  I have plenty of
>space to spare on that box.
>Ive heard rumors about Linux's NFS not working right with SUN...
>is that the case?

I've never tried it, and I hear that Linux's NFS implementation is
user-land, so there will be a performance hit on the Linux system, but it
should work.

On the other hand, finding an old SCSI disk (say, 500MB) should be easy &
cheap, and that would keep your Ethernet from being stomped on by a
diskless machine (Ethernet tops out at one megabyte per second, and SCSI-1
at five megabytes per second, so there is definitely good reason to go with
local disk if you can).

If you want to run the X Window System, you will probably want more RAM;
otherwise your system will page quite a bit. I have old Sun 3/60's that I
maxed out (24MB of 1x9 SIMMs!); given the age of the Sun 3/80 and the
relative cheapness of RAM that you can populate that system with, maxing it
out will be a good idea while those parts are still available.

	Erik