SUMMARY: Boot a Sun SPARCstation 5 without monitor or keyboard

Hi again Managers,

First of all, many thanks to Darren Dunham, Christophe Dupri, Willie Flint, 
Ben Rockwwood, Zaigui Wang, Peter Stokes, Andy Yother, Michael Schulte, 
Larye Parkins and Julie Peers.  Your pointing directions was, for the most 
of it, relevant and pertinent.

Most famous awnsers turned around verifying the init scripts (rc2.d and 
rc3.d) to find out which one was causing this.  Actually, no one did, and 
it was my first though.  I should have mentioned it before, I know, sorry!  ;-)

The next most famous awnser was to look into the "/etc/inittab" file to see 
if something was using the serial ports.  Once again, nothing there.  I 
also got something about PowerChute, and it was very relevant...   ...I 
though it was the awnser.  I desactivated all things regarding the 
PowerChute use, but it didn't solve the problem.

The third position of famous awnsers was something about the OS to switch 
from 8 bits to 7 bits data, and using 7 bits data from the terminal would 
solve the problem.  I tried it but it didn't work.

I had many other awnsers regarding some environment variables, terminal 
emulation, and so on, but there's too much to list.  But basically, it was 
sightly turning around it.

Finally, all these anwsers didn't help resolving the problem.  But, 
suddenly, I got a message from Julie Peers telling: "I have a feeling you 
are on 2.6?  If so patch it up to latest patch cluster and problems will 
not persist.".  Actually, this resolved my problem.  So, a special thank is 
dedicated to Julie Peers.

As well, just to mention that I was trying to hack-up a SPARCstation 5 I 
got on eBay, and the machine wasn't resetted.  Just like Zaigui Wang told 
me: "I had similar problem on my sparc5 a while ago. I got the machine from 
somebody else and I did not know what is on it. As soon I reinstalled the 
OS (solaris 8), everything works just fine.".  It was probably another good 
way to solve my problem, but honestly, I was too curious to see what was 
causing it, and since this machine wasn't used for a production 
environment, that was another very nice occasion to learn something new!

So that's it.  Thank you all again.

Here's my original post:

>Hi Managers,
>
>I have a strange problem here, and I'm guessing there's something tricky 
>there related to the fact that I'm trying to do something on a SPARCstation 5.
>
>I'm trying to boot up the machine through its serial port.  The cables are 
>in place, witha null modem, and everything goes very well through the boot 
>process.  When the system is up, the login prompt turns suddenly to 
>strange characters, and I'm not able to do anything else.
>
>If I reboot the machine and send the BREAK signal, I can interact 
>perfectly with the machine, I can boot in the single user mode and I can 
>log as well.  But I'm unable to do so in a normal boot process (init 3).
>
>Anyone have a workaround or an idea?  Of course, will summarise.
>
>Thanks!

__________________________________________
   Benont Audet

   C.E.P Atmosphair Inc.
   1600G Route de l'Airoport
   St-Jean Chrysostome (QC) G6Z 2L2
   418.834.7272   1 877 834.7272

   baudet@atmosphair.com
   http://www.atmosphair.com
__________________________________________
Que serait la vie sans le parachutisme?
Vive l'iti! 8^)
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