30 May
2024
30 May
'24
9:53 a.m.
I have one around here somewhere. Sun built two cables, one was for the
color boards (CGThree and CGFive) and the other was for monochrome
systems (the D15).
In the meantime you can hook a computer to the RS232 port and start
running the thing headless to see what's there. Note, you're going to
have to replace the timekeeper chip (or hack a new battery into it,
there's docs on how I did that 30 years ago). I recommend wiring in a
dual AAA adapter, that way you can replace the batteries every 15 or so
years.
Last time I fired up my three 386i's, two of the power supplies had
blown up and one of the boards would not pass diagnostics. Of the
supplies, one was hopeless so I hacked in a standard PC-AT supply board
and got everything running (you don't NEED the -15 volts, but heck some
ISA board you plug in will want it :-) and I figured out how to fix the
other one by wiring in a new 12 volt kick starter supply to get the main
supply up and running.
I wrote up all of this on the vcf forum. Worth a read.
If it's got a hard disk and it spins I'd recommend hooking it up to a
SCSI adapter and doing a dd image of it first. Then you can figure out
the partitions by whacking away at the image (I did this), then mount
the volumes on another system, grab /etc/passwd, and crack the passwords
in about 4 hours with john or a related tool.
Once up, put it on the public internet and confuse the hell out of hackers.
Have fun!
CZ
On 5/30/2024 4:59 AM, Stefano Sanna via cctalk wrote:
Hi.
I recently bought a Sun Microsystems 386i and I discovered (too late...)
that monitor and keyboard are connected to the same D15 connector on the
back using a "Y" cable (I had experience with other Sun workstations,
this was first contact with Intel-based hardware).
Unfortunately, I have not such a cable neither I was able to find any
info on the web about the pinout/wiring; probably it would be possible
to create the cable from scratch (assuming that no other circuitry was
inside the original Y cable). Moreover, I discovered that there is more
than one option for video boards (mono and color): therefore, there is
more than a single Y cable to connect monitor and keyboard.
Looking at the official Sun's hardware list, I found this item:
630-1621 386i video/keyboard cable
but it does not specify whether it is the mono or the color cable. In
any case, it seems impossible to buy it on eBay or similar.
Does anybody have some information on how to rebuild it?
Thank you.
-s