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The picture above shows a Sun Blade 100 that I got my hands on. Sun Blade is a series of UltraSPARC based workstations that Sun Microsystems started selling around the turn of the millennium. It apparently has nothing to do with blade servers.
From what I can find, the primary design focus seems to have been pushing the price down. A lot of contemporary PC components are used, e.g. regular VGA for the screen, USB for keyboard and mouse, PCI extension slots, "regular" PC133 RAM, IDE drives instead of SCSI, et cetera.
Having grown up with only x86 based PCs (safe for occasionally seeing a PowerPC based Mac), I was eager on the chance to get started playing with SPARC hardware and the software ecosystem around it.
Besides being cheaper and in better shape than other, used Sun machines I came across, what intrigued me about this systems was also its similarity to a plain old PC. This means that I do not yet have to start collecting a plethora of adapaters and special hardware for bus systems I kniw nothing about. While it is a missed learning opportunity, it also means I don't have to collect weird adapters and debug hardware and bus systems I know nothing about, in addition to the machine I know nothing about. For all intents and purposes, the Sun Blade 100 appears to basically be a weird PC that weighs around 17kg for some reason, and has an UltraSPARC CPU.
Some of the original specs:
The machine I got is visually in great condition, but the previous owner has obviously made some minor modifications to it. The CDROM drive was replaced with a DVD drive at some point, the 20 GB hard drive was also swapped out for 2 larger drives.
On this site, I attempt to collect and document my progress understanding the system.
Upon reset, the machine runs OpenBoot firmware from flash. The Wikipedia article tells us that OpenBoot originated on Sun, was eventually adopted by other vendors and turned into an IEEE standard called "Open Firmware".
The most significant part of it that is still around is the device tree format for describing hardware. Linux eventually adopted it for pretty much every non-x86 platform it supports.
If OpenBoot runs into an issue, or we decide to abort the boot process by pressing STOP+A on the keyboard, it drops us into a Forth based CLI, aka the "ok" prompt.
If the keyboard and screen are disconnected, the system defaults to using the serial as a console. You can simply connect a null modem cable to a PC and fire up a terminal emulator at 9600 baud, 8n1.
Similar to pressing STOP+A on the keyboard, you need to send a break command on the serial to make OpenBoot enter the "ok" prompt. On GNU screen, simply press C-a b.
Forgive the Moiré, but this is essentially the first thing I saw when powering up the machine: The IDPROM contents are invalid, the MAC address and Host ID are garbled, the machine gives up booting and we are dropped into the "ok" prompt.
The IDPROM is a battery backed SRAM and RTC chip. After 25 years, the battery appears to be flat. I had to figure out how to swap it out and restore the corrupted data:
NVRAM Restore
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