Terminal question for U5

[Doug White]

On Sat, 5 Mar 2005, Phil Stracchino wrote:

> Doug White wrote:
> > On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> >
> >
> >>I hope this is a quickie question:  What can I do to get a usable
> >>terminal for sysinstall on a Sun Ultra5, using the default built-in
> >>framebuffer attached to a Sun 365-1343 17" color monitor?  I have a
> >>perfectly good FreeBSD 5.3 sparc64 CD here which I can't install from
> >>because I can't see what I'm doing in sysinstall, because all the
> >>available terminal types appear to assume my screen is 80x25.
> >
> >
> > Use a serial console. Plug in a null-modem cable into the serial port,
> > connect the other end to a system of choice, and unplug the sun keyboard
> > from the U5. Fire up a terminal emulator on the other system. Boot the U5
> > from CD and follow the prompts. If you have another FreeBSD or Linux
> > machine you can typically get the color menus to work :)
>
> Thanks.  I suspected something like that might be the case.
> Unfortunately, I don't have a working serial-console cable here with me.

A decent null modem cable, or parts to make one, should be US$10-$20 at
any computer shop. An essential part of any sysadmin's toolkit.  I have
one with 9 and 25-pin plugs on both ends, and a male-male gender changer
to plug into Suns. I've had it for well over 10 years.

> > Note that you can't run X on the builtin display anyway so unless you
> > particularly like the slow OBP console you'll want to use some other
> > method of communication.
>
> Well, I was figuring the box would run headless.  It's tasked to be a
> nameserver and not much else at present.  But by the sound of things,
> unless I can come up with a working serial console cable, I may have to
> rethink what to put on it.

Solaris still works and is a free download for personal use. :)

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite at gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org