I recently acuired a Sparc 5 and a 17" Sun Monitor. It seems like this system is trying to boot from the network. After going through the boot sequence it keeps echoing "le0: No carrier". Is it just looking for a dhcp server? How can I assign a static? I was told that there was an OS on the unit but I'm trying to find out where to begin. I'm a Sun newbie. Can I put Solaris 9 on this thing? It has a 1.5 GB Hard drive and about 64 MB of RAM and room for a cd-rom. Is there any other way to install solaris besides a cd-rom? Can I setup a ftp server? Can anyone point me to a good starting point to get some education on this unit. Thanks in advance. Anthony.

Ok, the system prints this out while it starts to boot. "SunOS relase 5.5.1 UNIX System V Release 4.01". I put it on my network which has a dhcp server and now it just hangs. The nic and switch port lights are lighting up. Last lines of the boot sequence are: Flushing routing table: add net default: gateway 138.12.137.121 NIS domainname is pclprod starting rpc services: rpcbind keyserv ypbind kerbd done. That ip address is not on my network it was configured in before. So, I can't boot it when it's not on the network and I can't boot it when it's on the network. Any suggestions? Thanks, Anthony.

Hello Anthony Sounds Like your best off doing a reinstall, if this system is new and you have no data to loose , your best off instead of inheriting problems from the previous owner. Installing Solaris sounds scary but its ok. That way you have a new system and you know that problems you have will not be caused by the last owner. If you want to continue to troubleshoot the way you are now just let me know and I will see if I can help. Best of Luck

Hi, Jonob is right. Sure you can change from hanging on the le0-device. But it is a good idea to install the system completely new. You lern a lot by this procedure. On the other hand it is very easy to install Solaris and learn some things about partitioning, networking, devices. Please remember, that you are working with a System V Unix. So it should be easy to lern scripting for many platforms. After you have installed the system and run in problems about some configuration parts, than have a look at the /etc/rc*.d directory. This scripts are startscripts and these are full of information how the system will be configured. Good Luck Heiko

Another positive note. I have Solaris 9 running on a Sparc 5 (128Mb RAM) and it runs just fine. It's my ftp server. No CDE though, command line only because CDE takes up way too much CPU for such a tiny box. If all you want is an ftp server, just install the core OS. I use an external SCSI as my data drive. The 50-pin SCSI connector that is standard on the Sparc 5 saves a chunk of change. It's not the beefiest machine on the planet but I serve 150 FTP clients without issue. Have fun