Notices by Tube🌞Time (tubetime@mastodon.social), page 14

this is step 2 after i tidied things up a lot.

in fact, the magnetic amplifiers it uses are exactly the same. Ken wrote a very nice article about magnetic amplifiers for the IEEE Spectrum, so i won't explain it again: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-vacuum-tubes-forgotten-rival

macintoshes!

last electronics flea market of the year! this is at West Valley college in Silicon Valley.

cameras!

@davidbisset my personal favorite.

spoke too soon. another parity error, this time at U677. why there? because that's where i moved the module that was at U676. think i will just pull that bank of RAM for now.

uh oh, RAM parity error. i'm hoping U676 isn't seated all the way and that it is an easy fix.

*earlier* what i have here is a Sun SPARCstation 1+.

welp, how'd i get into THIS situation? let's rewind...

well, I broke down and put in a spinning rust disk. the installer is much happier now and is copying files.

zululog.txt has the smoking gun:

[996859ms] WARNING: Host used command 0x1A which is affected by drive geometry. Current settings are 63 sectors x 255 heads = 16065 but image size of 2097152 sectors is not divisible. This can cause error messages in diagnostics tools.

i think the solution here is to resize the disk image file so it is divisible by 63*255*512.

i bet it is this issue. basically the ZuluSCSI returns values for disk geometry that somehow confuses the Solaris partition tool. one solution is to use a real SCSI hard drive and then dd it over to the ZuluSCSI once the install is completed.

https://github.com/ZuluSCSI/ZuluSCSI-firmware/discussions/122#discussioncomment-4418076

it's going to need a little work but WHAT is that blob of duct tape

omfg they swizzled it 🤦♂️

anyway. trying an older Solaris installer and it is really surprised at the date -- could it really be 10,405 days after 1995?

so i tried placing a drive image at SCSI ID 3 and *it boots as SD(0,0,0)vmunix* wtaf lol. seems like Sun cheated and swizzled some SCSI IDs around.

yay it works now! i tried SCSI ID 1.

i just happen to have one, new in box! i bought this years ago at Weird Stuff Warehouse when they were still around. i have no idea why, but i'm glad i did.

on the back, we have the usual semi-cursed 13W3 video connector and the Sun keyboard connector. where am i going to find a Sun keyboard?