Console access to Sun Fire V880

[Jochen Wiedmann]

Hi,

yesterday we received a Sun Fire V880 server here, which is being used
as a development and test machine. This is the first SPARC we have
since years, because we are usually using i386 machines. The machine
was previously in use by someone else and I have no access to the
previous users. In particular, I have no idea about network
configuration and stuff like that. No problem, I thought, lets start
with a clean installation.

Obviously, I need console access to do the installation. Inspection
showed, that there seem to be two serial lines on the machines back:
One with 25 pins, female, and one with an RJ45 connector. Of course,
nothing was delivered with the machine. Sun admins are most possibly
supposed to have such stuff. I managed to obtain a connector from RJ45
to my laptops 9 pin, male connector, an RJ45 cable and a connector
from RJ45 to 25 pins, female. Nothing crossed, or stuff like that,
AFAIK.

Unfortunately, I was absolutely unable to get a boot prompt from the
machine. I tried both serial connectors, I tried Hyperterminal
(Windows) and picocom (Linux), varying device names (COM1, COM2, ...
or /dev/ttyS0, /dev/ttyS1, ...) with no success.

Any ideas, what I might be doing wrong? Or other ways to perform the
installation?

Thanks,

Jochen

[John Oliver]

First, you need the right cable. See if you can beg, borrow, or steal a
Cisco serial cable... it's a light blue ribbon cable with a molded DB-9F
at one end and an RJ-45 at the other.

Then you need to connect the Sun to a PC. Since you seem to be unsure
about Linux serial ports, I'd use Windows. Hyperterminal or PuTTY.
Google for the port settings, but I'm pretty sure it's 9800-8N1 no flow
control.

--
* John Oliver http://www.john-oliver.net/ *