Re: [PLUG] sparc problem

[Chris Hedemark <chrish@trilug.org>]

On Wednesday, March 19, 2003, at 11:21 AM, Fred K Ollinger wrote:

> I moved houses, and now my sparc will not boot. I checked 
> www.google.com,
> and read a lot of manpages, to no avail.
>
> Here's the relevent error:
>
> "Can't open input device.
> Keyboard not available. Using tty for input and output."

OK so it is dropping to a serial console.  You can still access it via 
null modem cable (this is how I run all my suns at home anyway).

> Then the screen goes black.

Right.  Your locally attached monitor is no longer the console.

> The keyborad was plugged in at all times, and there was no known 
> damage so
> I'm not sure if this is really the problem. I wanted to run it headless
> anyway, but it won't connect via ethernet eventhough I thought I had it
> configged properly (worked headless before I moved). How to set up tty?
> What hardware do I need?

It sounds like there may have been some damage in the move.  If you had 
a keyboard plugged in and you got that particular error message, then 
something is amiss.

You can get a null modem cable (NOT a regular modem cable) and console 
in from any old PeeCee with a serial port.  Even from Windoze.  Your 
Sun should have autoconfigured itself to use serial port A as the 
console.  Do you have another computer to use as a console until you 
can figure out what all is wrong?

Serial port settings for the console box should be 9600/8/N/1 with no 
flow control.

Chris Hedemark
PGP/GnuPG Public Key at http://yonderway.com/chris/hedemark.gpg

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