In early 2022 I got several Sun SPARC servers for free off of a FreeCycle ad: I was recently called out for not providing any sort of update on those devices… so here we go!
↫ Sidneys1.com
Some information on booting old-style SPARC machines, as well as pretty pictures. Nice palate-cleanser if you’ve had to deal with something unpleasant this weekend. This world would be a better place if we all had our own Sun machines to play with when we get sad.
My old Ultra 2 Enterprise had similar issues. The NVRAM modules was toast so I had to jump through hoops to get it to boot properly. Priced a replacement but they were too much. I did come across a reasonably priced one but the listing on eBay looked exceedingly shady so I didn’t buy it. Sadly I couldn’t give the workstation away. Ended up taking it and the 21 inch HP CRT (which worked perfectly fine – but weighed a ton and was unwieldy to move around) to the city dump to their electronics recycling section. What a waste. :-(. Oh and to add insult to injury, I had to pay $25 USD to recycle the CRT!
8 0 20 13 de ad c0ffee mkpl
CTRL-D then CTRL-R
if you get a copyright notice it failed. Blank line it succeded.
is easier and faster than mkp command. I believe it does require the idprom to already be invalid though which is still faster to invalidate it with mkp then use mkpl. Look up the mkpl command online for more information eg some machines require different machine types input to the command.
“Frequently Asked Questions about Sun NVRAM/hostid” is what you want to google for.