Any 3B1 alive?
tenox
I'm looking to get a small C program compiled on 3B1 SysV Unix and get
the binary back? Can anyone with a working system help me out? I have
floppies with 3B1 development kit if anyone requires.
Thanks a lot
Atenox
DoN. Nichols
Well ... at the moment, I have a rack with a Sun Fire 280R, an
Exabyte 430 Mammoth-2 tape library, a Sun D-1000 JBOD full of SCA
drives, and a Criiterion/EMC Fibre Channel JBOD full of FC drives where
I use to have a table just big enough to support the 3B1 and the
external drive housing (modified from a 3B2 system). Things are really
too crowded to do much here. The system did run a bit less than a year
ago, before being moved into storage again.
I hope that you get someone else who can do it for you.
Is there any chance that this program will require libs which
don't exist in the 3B1? One example of a simple program which can't be
compiled on the 3B1 is the "ping" net utility. It requires "utime()"
which is not supported in the 3B1 kernelj, so the ethernet utilities for
the 3B1 lack that -- and I wondered why and tried to compile from net
sources.
And looking up your domain I get quite confused. ".tc" as the e-mail
domain for the administrator, but the supposed physical location being
in Vancouver BC Canada. And an IP block in Ireland? Very strange. And
more so the deeper I dig. :-)
What is this program supposed to do? If it has anything to do
with crypto I would have to pass even if my machine were sitting there
ready to turn on.
Good Luck,
DoN.
--
Email: <dnic...@d-and-d.com> | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---
SDF Poster
email me privately. The 3B2 that was 'SDF' is accessible via TELNET and
you can 'cu' from there to the 3B1.
tenox
> Well ... at the moment, I have a rack with a Sun Fire 280R, an
> Exabyte 430 Mammoth-2 tape library, a Sun D-1000 JBOD full of SCA
> drives, and a Criiterion/EMC Fibre Channel JBOD full of FC drives where
> I use to have a table just big enough to support the 3B1 and the
> external drive housing (modified from a 3B2 system). Things are really
> too crowded to do much here. The system did run a bit less than a year
> ago, before being moved into storage again.
That's nice. I have few 220/420R and 250/450 boxes lying around in
various places. They are quite nice. What I don't like though is where
SUN is going with the OS. But perhaps it's the only way to fight the
plague.
> I hope that you get someone else who can do it for you.
I hope as well. I actually have two 7300 systems but they both DOA
with blown power supply. One day maybe someone will fix them up.
> Is there any chance that this program will require libs which
> don't exist in the 3B1? One example of a simple program which can't be
> compiled on the 3B1 is the "ping" net utility. It requires "utime()"
> which is not supported in the 3B1 kernelj, so the ethernet utilities for
> the 3B1 lack that -- and I wondered why and tried to compile from net
> sources.
I don't think so. It did compile on quite few obscure systems around
already so I suspect there shouldn't be anything special required.
> And looking up your domain I get quite confused. ".tc" as the e-mail
> domain for the administrator, but the supposed physical location being
> in Vancouver BC Canada. And an IP block in Ireland? Very strange. And
> more so the deeper I dig. :-)
You're still missing few countries, but I wouldn't scratch it too
much ;)
> What is this program supposed to do? If it has anything to do
> with crypto I would have to pass even if my machine were sitting there
> ready to turn on.
No I leave cryptography to those who are in need of it... just this:
http://www.tenox.tc/out/#aclock
;)
Regards
A
DoN. Nichols
>
>> Well ... at the moment, I have a rack with a Sun Fire 280R, an
>> Exabyte 430 Mammoth-2 tape library, a Sun D-1000 JBOD full of SCA
>> drives, and a Criiterion/EMC Fibre Channel JBOD full of FC drives where
>> I use to have a table just big enough to support the 3B1 and the
>> external drive housing (modified from a 3B2 system). Things are really
>> too crowded to do much here. The system did run a bit less than a year
>> ago, before being moved into storage again.
>
> That's nice. I have few 220/420R and 250/450 boxes lying around in
> various places. They are quite nice. What I don't like though is where
> SUN is going with the OS. But perhaps it's the only way to fight the
> plague.
Well ... there are also several other OS's depending on your
tastes. I run OpenBSD on some of the systems, and the number of
possible systems has just increased with 4.3, because they now support
more than one SPARC CPU. I've got several machines which I will
probably try that on, with the Ultra 60 being the most likely first one.
The SB-1000s and the Sun Fire 280R are too busy actually *doing* things
under Solaris 10 to rip that out at present.
>> I hope that you get someone else who can do it for you.
>
> I hope as well. I actually have two 7300 systems but they both DOA
> with blown power supply. One day maybe someone will fix them up.
Hmm ... you know that you could splice in a PC XT or later power
supply if you are willing to run it opened up. The PS produces +5V,
+12V, and -12V -- all of which you can get from a PC power supply. You
could even run a cable out the power cord connector/fuse holder hole in
the case.
Hmm ... what happened to the power supplies? One failure which
I have seen in the past is overheating on one or two of the power pins,
causing the solder on the PC board to melt and either drip off or turn
into a cold solder joint. Clean the contacts and re-flow the solder
(perhaps with a bridge of solid copper wire on the underside of the
board) and you might bring the system back to life with an internal PS.
Unfortunately, the schematics for the PS are not available, making it
more difficult to fix a more serious problem.
>> Is there any chance that this program will require libs which
>> don't exist in the 3B1? One example of a simple program which can't be
>> compiled on the 3B1 is the "ping" net utility. It requires "utime()"
>> which is not supported in the 3B1 kernelj, so the ethernet utilities for
>> the 3B1 lack that -- and I wondered why and tried to compile from net
>> sources.
>
> I don't think so. It did compile on quite few obscure systems around
> already so I suspect there shouldn't be anything special required.
O.K. And I just compiled it on Solaris 10 using gcc. (Of
course, you can't compile it as a fully static program, since they don't
supply libc.a as a static lib -- only as a shared lib. :-(
And it complies nicely with the standard C compiler from their
fancy development set as well.
A pity I don't have a place to set up the 3B1.
>> And looking up your domain I get quite confused. ".tc" as the e-mail
>> domain for the administrator, but the supposed physical location being
>> in Vancouver BC Canada. And an IP block in Ireland? Very strange. And
>> more so the deeper I dig. :-)
>
> You're still missing few countries, but I wouldn't scratch it too
> much ;)
I stopped tracing after a while -- I was confused enough so
there was no point finding out anything else. :-)
>> What is this program supposed to do? If it has anything to do
>> with crypto I would have to pass even if my machine were sitting there
>> ready to turn on.
>
> No I leave cryptography to those who are in need of it... just this:
> http://www.tenox.tc/out/#aclock
A neat program.
Dennis Lefebvre
> On 2008-04-22, tenox <a...@tenoware.com> wrote:
> Hmm ... you know that you could splice in a PC XT or later power
> supply if you are willing to run it opened up. The PS produces +5V,
> +12V, and -12V -- all of which you can get from a PC power supply. You
> could even run a cable out the power cord connector/fuse holder hole in
> the case.
>
Sorry, to ask such a primitive question, but I've never owned a
desktop machine other than the 3B1. Is the 18-pin connector to the
system board ribbon cable a standard type used on other power
supplies?
tenox
> Well ... there are also several other OS's depending on your
> tastes. I run OpenBSD on some of the systems, and the number of
> possible systems has just increased with 4.3, because they now support
> more than one SPARC CPU. I've got several machines which I will
> probably try that on, with the Ultra 60 being the most likely first one.
> The SB-1000s and the Sun Fire 280R are too busy actually *doing* things
> under Solaris 10 to rip that out at present.
Cool. I've been running OpenBSD on several Netras t1 I have. The only
problem I was having so far is their disk mirroring. As far as I can
remember there were three different ways of mirroring and none of them
were even close to something like Disk Suite on Solaris.
> Hmm ... you know that you could splice in a PC XT or later power
> supply if you are willing to run it opened up. The PS produces +5V,
> +12V, and -12V -- all of which you can get from a PC power supply. You
> could even run a cable out the power cord connector/fuse holder hole in
> the case.
Didn't know about that. Interesting.
> Hmm ... what happened to the power supplies? One failure which
> I have seen in the past is overheating on one or two of the power pins,
> causing the solder on the PC board to melt and either drip off or turn
> into a cold solder joint. Clean the contacts and re-flow the solder
> (perhaps with a bridge of solid copper wire on the underside of the
> board) and you might bring the system back to life with an internal PS.
> Unfortunately, the schematics for the PS are not available, making it
> more difficult to fix a more serious problem.
Just blown on power on. First one, I saw something flashed on the
screen and then kaboom! The second one actually started booting from
the disks and then, same story. I've gave it to an old computer/tv
repair shop and the guys looked at this and say FUBAR. There are many
parts blown up on the mainboard. Very sad story.
> O.K. And I just compiled it on Solaris 10 using gcc. (Of
> course, you can't compile it as a fully static program, since they don't
> supply libc.a as a static lib -- only as a shared lib. :-(
Surely there has to be a way of getting libc from opensolaris.org and
compiling it statically. Also I always wanted to build it as a stand-
alone binary so I can boot it from open prom. Shouldn't be too complex
having sources.
> And it complies nicely with the standard C compiler from their
> fancy development set as well.
Yep.
> A pity I don't have a place to set up the 3B1.
A pity my two 3B1s blown up. :(
> A neat program.
Thanks ;) I run it on few consoles around. Also I've made a version
for Novell NetWare so it can run on this begging for help never used
server console. If there are any NetWare servers still around...
Regards,
a
DoN. Nichols
Nope -- it is unique to the 3B1/7300 -- at least as a power
supply connector. PC power supplies used two shorter connectors side by
side on flat bladed pins, not the round or square ones which the 3B1 used.
However, the pins are standard Molex style pins, and can be
acquired stand alone or in rows in a nylon carrier. (That carrier will
probably melt if you solder wires directly to the pins unless you have a
heat sink of some sort clipped on the pins.
As for the power connector layout --
+12V 12, 14, 16
+5V 2, 4, 6, 8, 10
-12V 18
GND 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17 (All odd pins)
The Technical Reference Manual does not show which end the pins
start at, so you'll have to measure resistance to the chassis mounting
screws, which are ground. Check the underside of the power supply board
if it is removed from the chassis, because only one of the corner screws
may actually connect to ground.
Alternatively, measure resistance from the first to the next to
last pin starting from both ends. The ones which give a zero (or
extremely low) resistance will be the ground pins (the odd pins), and
you know that 1 is the one of those which is at the end of the array.
As for the pinout of the XT style power supply, this can be
found by web searches, and I don't know it without doing such a search.
IIRC, the last of one connector and the first of the second are ground
(black wire), and red are +5V, yellow is +12V, orange might be -12V and
any other colors should be ignored. :-)
I believe that the connector used on the stiff ribbon cable was
made by TRW. I was able to find some at a hamfest, and have so far
replaced one badly burned connector on one system.
Hold the connector in a drill press vise or something similar
(smooth jaws), and use a screwdriver to drive each wire (one at a time)
into the wire grip at the top of each pin.
Oh yes -- if it is a 3B1 instead of a 7300, you will also
probably need a short extension for a drive power connector, as the hard
drive gets its power directly from the power supply, while on the 7300,
the power for the hard drive is routed through the system board.
DoN. Nichols
>
>> Well ... there are also several other OS's depending on your
>> tastes. I run OpenBSD on some of the systems, and the number of
>> possible systems has just increased with 4.3, because they now support
>> more than one SPARC CPU. I've got several machines which I will
>> probably try that on, with the Ultra 60 being the most likely first one.
>> The SB-1000s and the Sun Fire 280R are too busy actually *doing* things
>> under Solaris 10 to rip that out at present.
>
> Cool. I've been running OpenBSD on several Netras t1 I have. The only
> problem I was having so far is their disk mirroring. As far as I can
> remember there were three different ways of mirroring and none of them
> were even close to something like Disk Suite on Solaris.
I've tried the RAID system on OpenBSD, and abandoned it. The
same with Online Disk Suite on Solaris -- but on recent versions of
Solaris 10, there is a new system called zfs which is really easy to set
up and use. I've got two zfs pools (clusters of disk drives treated as
a single resource) with a number of filesystems on each. one is five 18
GB SCA drives with one hot spare serving to hold the multiple home
directories (mine, my wife's, and some for local guest accounts), and
the other containing lots of export filesystems inlcuding three
collections of photo images). This second pool is on five active and
two hot spare 36 GB FC drives in an EMC FC JBOD.
>
>> Hmm ... you know that you could splice in a PC XT or later power
>> supply if you are willing to run it opened up. The PS produces +5V,
>> +12V, and -12V -- all of which you can get from a PC power supply. You
>> could even run a cable out the power cord connector/fuse holder hole in
>> the case.
>
> Didn't know about that. Interesting.
Assuming that the system board itself survived. I fear that it
did not given the following description.
>> Hmm ... what happened to the power supplies? One failure which
>> I have seen in the past is overheating on one or two of the power pins,
>> causing the solder on the PC board to melt and either drip off or turn
>> into a cold solder joint. Clean the contacts and re-flow the solder
>> (perhaps with a bridge of solid copper wire on the underside of the
>> board) and you might bring the system back to life with an internal PS.
>> Unfortunately, the schematics for the PS are not available, making it
>> more difficult to fix a more serious problem.
>
> Just blown on power on. First one, I saw something flashed on the
> screen and then kaboom! The second one actually started booting from
> the disks and then, same story. I've gave it to an old computer/tv
> repair shop and the guys looked at this and say FUBAR. There are many
> parts blown up on the mainboard. Very sad story.
What is the AC voltage where you are located? (I've lost track
of your physical location). Most 3B1s come with a single input
voltage power supply for 110-120 VAC input. If your local voltage is
instead 220-240 VAC, then yes, I would expect it to die quickly, and to
possibly take out componenets on the system board as well.
If you get another one, and have 110-120 VAC available for it,
one recommendation is to (while the system is open) use a vacuum cleaner
on the ridges above the power supply. This is actually ventilation for
the poweer supply, and if it is clogged with dust, the power supply will
overheat during long running.
>> O.K. And I just compiled it on Solaris 10 using gcc. (Of
>> course, you can't compile it as a fully static program, since they don't
>> supply libc.a as a static lib -- only as a shared lib. :-(
>
> Surely there has to be a way of getting libc from opensolaris.org and
> compiling it statically. Also I always wanted to build it as a stand-
> alone binary so I can boot it from open prom. Shouldn't be too complex
> having sources.
Yes -- you can build it -- if you build the whole system as part
of the task. And I think that you may have to modify the Makefile to
keep it from deleting libc.a when it has done what it needs to do. :-)
>> And it complies nicely with the standard C compiler from their
>> fancy development set as well.
>
> Yep.
>
>> A pity I don't have a place to set up the 3B1.
>
> A pity my two 3B1s blown up. :(
>
>> A neat program.
>
> Thanks ;) I run it on few consoles around. Also I've made a version
> for Novell NetWare so it can run on this begging for help never used
> server console. If there are any NetWare servers still around...
O.K.
Enjoy,
Bill Gunshannon
Does anyone know the current requirements? The fact they use so many pins
for each would make on think the current requirements are higher than what
a cheapie PC PS might provide.
>
> The Technical Reference Manual does not show which end the pins
> start at, so you'll have to measure resistance to the chassis mounting
> screws, which are ground. Check the underside of the power supply board
> if it is removed from the chassis, because only one of the corner screws
> may actually connect to ground.
>
> Alternatively, measure resistance from the first to the next to
> last pin starting from both ends. The ones which give a zero (or
> extremely low) resistance will be the ground pins (the odd pins), and
> you know that 1 is the one of those which is at the end of the array.
If industry practice was followed the solder pad for pin 1 should be
square while the others are round. I would still measure resistance
to a known ground point, but a square pad would be a good place to start.
bill
--
Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves
bill...@cs.scranton.edu | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton |
Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include <std.disclaimer.h>
DoN. Nichols
> In article <slrng0vppb....@katana.d-and-d.com>,
> "DoN. Nichols" <dnic...@d-and-d.com> writes:
>> On 2008-04-23, Dennis Lefebvre <uni...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Apr 22, 11:17 pm, "DoN. Nichols" <dnich...@d-and-d.com> wrote:
>>>> On 2008-04-22, tenox <a...@tenoware.com> wrote:
>>>> Hmm ... you know that you could splice in a PC XT or later power
>>>> supply if you are willing to run it opened up. The PS produces +5V,
>>>> +12V, and -12V -- all of which you can get from a PC power supply. You
>>>> could even run a cable out the power cord connector/fuse holder hole in
>>>> the case.
[ ... ]
>> Nope -- it is unique to the 3B1/7300 -- at least as a power
>> supply connector. PC power supplies used two shorter connectors side by
>> side on flat bladed pins, not the round or square ones which the 3B1 used.
>>
>> However, the pins are standard Molex style pins, and can be
>> acquired stand alone or in rows in a nylon carrier. (That carrier will
>> probably melt if you solder wires directly to the pins unless you have a
>> heat sink of some sort clipped on the pins.
[ ... ]
> Does anyone know the current requirements? The fact they use so many pins
> for each would make on think the current requirements are higher than what
> a cheapie PC PS might provide.
The standard PC Power Supply uses multiple pins for each voltage
(except perhaps the -12 which nobody draws much current from).
It seems that each +5V pin powers a different subset of the
system. One pin powers the memory, one the CPU, one the logic for the
floppy and hard disc controllers. I forget whether there is a separate
pin powering the three card slots under the main system card or not.
But I do know that having a bad connection on one pin produces
lots of disk errors (especially band when there is a glitch during a
write), another produces memory errors, another produces CPU confusion,
and the like.
>>
>> The Technical Reference Manual does not show which end the pins
>> start at, so you'll have to measure resistance to the chassis mounting
>> screws, which are ground. Check the underside of the power supply board
>> if it is removed from the chassis, because only one of the corner screws
>> may actually connect to ground.
>>
>> Alternatively, measure resistance from the first to the next to
>> last pin starting from both ends. The ones which give a zero (or
>> extremely low) resistance will be the ground pins (the odd pins), and
>> you know that 1 is the one of those which is at the end of the array.
>
> If industry practice was followed the solder pad for pin 1 should be
> square while the others are round. I would still measure resistance
> to a known ground point, but a square pad would be a good place to start.
IIRC, there is a square pad for pin 1 -- but you have to look at
the underside of the power supply to see this, because the pins are
joined by a strip of white nylon which holds them all aligned while they
are being soldered to the board.
Sometimes, it helps to examine the underside of the system board
for "cold solder" joints (the surface of the solder looks rather flat
like moss instead of shiny). If you see this, get a solder sucker to
pull away the old solder and then re-flow fresh lead-tin solder (not any
of the modern lead-free stuff, because it melts at a higher temperature
and the boards may not take the extra heat. Just before sucking it
away, flow a little fresh solder into the junction of the soldering iron
tip and the solder on the board. This causes it to melt more quickly so
the sucker can pull it out quickly.
Anyway -- after doing this, polish the pins on the top side of
the power supply board -- and if you have a good contact cleaner like
Cramolin (no longer made) or De-Ox-It (same company and I think still
made), spray the pins and the female connector with it, slide the female
connector onto the male and off a few times, wipe the pins dry, and
re-spray with the contact cleaner before re-assembling.
Note -- it is the habit of these pins oxidizing which probably
accounts for how many pins were used for each voltage. PC and XT style
power supplies used a different connector, and still had something like
14 pins total -- just four fewer than the 3B1 did.