A little OT? Sun PS questions... - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

7 Apr 1999

--- Aaron Christopher Finney &lt;af-list(a)lafleur.wfi-inc.com&gt; wrote:
...
  Speaking of sparcs,

 This might be a little OT, but it does *involve* a Sun 3/50. At least the
 dead shell of one. John Lawson was kind enough to donate the mainboard
 from a Sparcserver 600MP to the cause today, but I don't have anywhere to
 put it (no comments on that, please). The question is this: can I put this
 board into the 3/50's case? From what I understand, the old VME chassis
 only provided power. Of course, the capacity of the 3/50's ps is a
 question too; I think it's rated somewhere around 20A at 5v, and the 600MP
 board requires something like 15A @ 5v, with no RAM or Mbus modules. 
I tried that with no good results.  I'm told that the 3/50 PSU doesn't
provide both +12v and -12v on the single power connector, or that the
6xx/MP board doesn't get comm voltages from that particular connector
or some other power-related reason why RS-232 doesn't work in that
configuration.

I was also told that the 6xx/MP board wants to see some kind of termination
on some of the VME signals or it won't past self-test.  As I said, I could
never make it work, and the original 3/50 mainboard _does_ work in my 3/50
chassis, so it's not an overall PSU problem.

Further, I am also told that a 6XX/MP board _will_ work in any sort of
Sun VMS cage, including a 4/110 tower, one of the smaller configurations
that Sun sold.

BTW, don't try to run a newer version of Solaris on that board... Solaris 2.6
has checks for the 6XX/MP line and halts on startup.  2.7 (Solaris 7) is
completely missing kernel support for any VME machines.

If you find out any of this is wrong, I'd love to hear it; maybe someday
I could get my configuration working.  For now, I'll restore the 3/50 as
is.

-ethan

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