Sun SparcStation 4 - Need Help to Hook up cables, & Docs

SS4s are not bad little systems if you want to get started playing with sparc32; basically a factory-hobbled SS5. I see Jonathan gave you a pretty good rundown ... not much I can add to that ... if you have a monitor but you are missing the keyboard and mouse, I have way more sets of Sun Type 5 keyboards and mice than I will ever know what to do with; you're welcome to a set for cost-of-shipping from Michigan, just ask. I find it's most convenient to run them off the serial console as Jonathan describes at least for initial testing... there's a good chance that the little Dallas battery-backed SRAM is dead at this point in time, which might nuke any password that might be set in OpenFirmware ... If not, I think there is a jumper on the mainboard you can use. I am pretty certain there is always a workaround for the firmware password on this series of machines (not always the case with some platforms and vendors) so you should be able to get in there one way or the other ... If it's just that the root password for a Solaris install on the disk is unknown, no worries, just reload the machine, no problem, lots of operating systems will run on these old Suns. You don't want someone's old gungy installation anyway :O Another side effect of the NVRAM battery going flat that you will want to be aware of is that the MAC address of the internal Ethernet NIC will be wiped out ... so you will have to manually set it every time you power up the machine... this gets annoying. The easiest and cheapest workaround is probably to just get yourself one of those dirt-common Sun 10BT+SCSI Sbus cards and add that in there; the MAC address is hard-coded on those so you don't have to fool around so much if you want to get the machine on a network. You might already have one ... is there an Sbus card installed? Also curious about what monitor you have ... most if not all Sun monitors are just rebadged Sony and Hitachi CRTs and all I would typically expect to see on them is the IEC power plug and 13W3 for video ... usually if there was a port for stereo glasses, it was on the video card itself ... as Jonathan says, definitely no PS/2 here! These machines will run NetBSD and OpenBSD very well, older releases of Solaris (i.e. 2.5, 2.6) more slowly. I've still got a few SS4s myself but don't run them too much. You probably won't get too much support from "Sun" now that they have been swallowed up into the evil empire of Oracle but there's just tons of information about these machines floating around on the Web; these systems and their cousins the SS5 and SS20 were very popular in the workstation market and thus pretty common in collectors hands. Best, Sean On Sun, May 3, 2015 at 3:36 PM, Jonathan Katz <jon at jonworld.com> wrote: