phaq

After I had finally found a solution to my 13W3-VGA adapter issue the time is ready to install Debian onto the machine.
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Connecting a standard PC-Monitor to an SGI causes usually no problems as long as it supports sync-on-green, sometimes also referred to as composite-sync signal. All usual high end monitors and the better flat screens support sync-on-green, a list of compatible monitors is available at the Linux for Playstation 2 website.

If you are lucky and have an SGI 13W3-to-VGA cable at hands, your monitor will most likely work like a charm.
But what happens if you only have on of those generic SUN 13W3-to-VGA adaptors at hand?
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When I installed Debian GNU/Linux yesterday I encountered this error message:

It basically says something like “No installabe kernel image found…. You may continue although this very strange error is most likely fatal.”

Hmmm. I didn’t ever encounter an error message like that before. When choosing to continue the Installer stopped with another error message stateing that installation of a package (the kernel….) had failed.

So what exactly was the point in asking me to continue when it aborts anyway?

Symptoms

The FreeBSD boot loader seems to hang at startup. The system will not respond and not boot.
Either nothing or one of the following may be printed on the system console:

|

or

boot: -D

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This article describes a concept on how to implement realtime file system replication on a dual-node FreeBSD cluster to provide real HA services.
Maybe you are familiar with DRBD (distributed replicated block device) from the Linux world already, which basically does something we could call network-RAID1.
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I recently acquired two additional CPU modules for my ancient E450 through eBay.

When they arrived today I couldn’t resist any longer: I simply had to rip the cover off the machine and put them inside…

These are the babies, two UltraSparc II modules and the DC power converters:

This is where the DC power converters will fit in, it’s always one per CPU module. Actually it’s not hard to get the CPU modules at last, it’s the DC converters which are usually quiet expensive. Luckily enough I could get them for only 29 € per piece

And this is what it looks like when they’re fitted:

Now it’s time to plug the CPU modules…

Gosh! Looks awesome, does it!?

Now it’s time to see…

… if it works. Hmm…. the serial console says only ‘connected’ …

*sigh* I’m just to nervous! After a few seconds OpenBoot reports ’4 x UltraSparc-II 296 MHz’.

But before I could actually boot into FreeBSD, I had to change a setting to ensure that OpenBoot would report all installed CPUs to the OS. So in OpenBoot I typed:

{0} ok setenv .upa-noprobe-mask 0
{0} ok reset-all

This would reset the CPU probing mechanism and reboot the machine.

If I had done so in the first place (which I actually didn’t), FreeBSD would have found all CPUs (which it apparently didn’t, it reported only three CPUs at the beginning).
My thanks go to Marcel for helping me in finding the lost CPU.
So even FreeBSD seems to like it after all

# dmesg|grep cpu
cpu0: Sun Microsystems UltraSparc-II Processor (296.00 MHz CPU)
cpu1: Sun Microsystems UltraSparc-II Processor (296.00 MHz CPU)
cpu2: Sun Microsystems UltraSparc-II Processor (296.00 MHz CPU)
cpu3: Sun Microsystems UltraSparc-II Processor (296.00 MHz CPU)