Soekris troubles (2.5" SATA hard drive mounting kit)

The system arrived with the motherboard mounted in the small (light green) case, and the 2.5" SATA hard drive mounting kit in a separate plastic bag. The drive kit is the problem

I'm using a SanDisk 256MB CF for the OS, and once I got the hang of PXEboot (and gave up on the 4.3 snapshots), installing OpenBSD to flash was easy enough.

The trouble came when I went to mount an extra laptop SATA drive in the case. The mounting kit came without instructions, just an iron bracket, four screws, four brass standoffs:


The standoffs replace the screws that mount the motherboard to the case, but the four screws are too long -- I tried using them to hold the plate (bracket) to the standoffs, and the case top would no longer fit, the screw sticks up to far.

Tried tightening the screw the rest of the way down, and succeeded...

in breaking off the threaded part in the case!

The bottom of the brass standoff can be seen in the socket on the bottom of the case, so now there's nothing holding down that corner of the motherboard:

The screws are too long to use anywhere, they also don't work to hold the drive to the bracket, but at least I managed not to break one off in the drive too.

Soekris arrived!

My Soekris Net5501-70 arrived today.

Oddly, the default serial console is 19200, not 9600. Working on CF boot media now, at least until I pick up a cheap multi-gigabyte card from Fry's.

POST: 012345689bcefghips1234ajklnopqr,,,tvwxy








comBIOS ver. 1.33  20070103  Copyright (C) 2000-2007 Soekris Engineering.

net5501

0512 Mbyte Memory                        CPU Geode LX 500 Mhz


Slot   Vend Dev  ClassRev Cmd  Stat CL LT HT  Base1    Base2   Int
-------------------------------------------------------------------
0:01:2 1022 2082 10100000 0006 0220 08 00 00 A0000000 00000000 10
0:06:0 1106 3053 02000096 0117 0210 08 40 00 0000E101 A0004000 11
0:07:0 1106 3053 02000096 0117 0210 08 40 00 0000E201 A0004100 05
0:08:0 1106 3053 02000096 0117 0210 08 40 00 0000E301 A0004200 09
0:09:0 1106 3053 02000096 0117 0210 08 40 00 0000E401 A0004300 12
0:20:0 1022 2090 06010003 0009 02A0 08 40 80 00006001 00006101
0:20:2 1022 209A 01018001 0005 02A0 08 00 00 00000000 00000000
0:21:0 1022 2094 0C031002 0006 0230 08 00 80 A0005000 00000000 15
0:21:1 1022 2095 0C032002 0006 0230 08 00 00 A0006000 00000000 15

 1 Seconds to automatic boot.   Press Ctrl-P for entering Monitor.

Intel UNDI, PXE-2.0 (build 082)
Copyright (C) 1997,1998,1999  Intel Corporation
VIA Rhine III Management Adapter v2.43 (2005/12/15)
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable

PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel PXE ROM.

No Boot device available, enter monitor.


comBIOS Monitor.   Press ? for help.

>

Re: Sunfire V100 reports "dc0: failed to force tx and rx to idle state"?

I'd mentioned dc0 problems quite a while back, and they're still an issue.

Just did a fresh install of 4.0 from the release CD on a Sunfire V100,and as soon as I did "ifconfig dc1 up", I got this message:

dc0: failed to force tx and rx to idle state

This time I hadn't even gotten around to setting up the network orforcing the speed and duplex, so it's not what I'd previously suspected...

I would still like to know what causes this, and whether it's something to worry about.

dc0: failed to force tx and rx to idle state

Sunfire V100 running OpenBSD 3.7 Sparc64 freshly installed offvia the official CD, is reporting "dc0: failed to force tx and rx toidle state".

Is this just cosmetic, or an actual problem?

Looking at the source code for the dc drive, this seems to be related tosetting speed and duplex (I lock the interfaces to 100/full).

I have an identical machine running 3.6, does not show this message,only the machines upgraded to 3.7 give this warning.

Strange hardware errors? Consider a PROM Firmware upgrade

Every so often we run into a machine, physically identical to other boxes successfully converted, that fails in weird ways -- network and drive controllers not found, sporadic failure to recognize drives, etc.

Sometimes the problem turns out to be an actual hardware problem,
other times the root cause is the firmware version, either OBP
(OpenBoot PROM) or (less commonly) POST. The Sparc64 project page
hints at such issues, but does not go into details.

Sun provides a "Standalone PROM Update Utility" on CDROM, as well as
documentation on upgrading firmware:
http://sunsolve.sun.com/data/802/802-3233/pdf/802-3233-25.pdf

It is technically possible to update the PROM from a netboot server.
If you don't already have a netboot server, an alternative (suggested by Mike Scher) for systems without a CDROM drive is to keep a bootable SCA drive, containing a 32-bit Solaris and the latest prom update utility in the root partition.

OpenBSD Sparc64 on Sunfire V120

OpenBSD works amazingly well on "our" new SunFire V100 hardware.

With my pre-existing netboot buildout, doing a network installation on the SunFire was quick and easy -- faster than the Solaris network installation, if not quite as self-completing as my "fire and forget" firewall build boot :)

There are a number of security enhancements inherent in OpenBSD by which we can justify this admittedly unusual choice of operating system for DNS and other specialized applications where security is more important than "normalization"

Kevin


(P.S. FreeBSD 5.0 for Sparc64 supports most of the same modern Solaris systems as OpenBSD (Oddly, no Ultra-2 SCSI support, but FreeBSD does work on E220/E250) and offers SMP support for systems that have multiple CPUs)