Ye Olde Rave AXi

This guy never could get the SPARCstation-20 operational - perhaps due to a failing PROM from the console messages - so I brought him a loaner, quark my old AXi box. He was pretty excited, until it wouldn't init a display, or even boot after spinning up the drives.

We cracked it open and he started hardware troublshooting it, but after about an hour, the excitement waned. I was pretty dissapointed too. I was going to bring him the Netra t1125, but forgot that one is console only - the reason I went to his shop in the first place - looking for an RS232 null-modem adapter. After enough time had passed I remembered the old L1-N keyboard trick and wondered if it would work? Utilizing STOP-N after the keyboard lights flashed, and holding them, I got the server to (presumbly) boot and load (there was much drive thrashing) but still no display. Enter a lights-out STOP-A and blindly sending commands to the ok prompt:

ok> setenv input-device keyboard
ok> setenv output-device screen
ok> reset-all

One more STOP-N boot-up and the monitor finally lit up as Solaris initialized. I was downright jubilant. Also surprised that this wasn't quark. This was serenity, a Solaris 10 box! I had no recollection of building this out as a 10 box (and with a non-standard root password on top of that), but sure enough Blastwave was on there and everything was done except mirroring of the drives. When I got home I found this entry dated July 2007 discussing my intent.


We've had lots of good times together.