Jake, sorry that I couldn't make it last night. I did mention that about the MAC address and the NVRAM. Since the battery on the NVRAM is dead, you'll have to re-enter the MAC address every time you boot it up. Annoying but not that big of a deal. https://blog.pizzabox.computer/posts/dead-vram/

About the "no bash" shell thing... Yeah... I think by default, Solaris comes with cshell as the default because it's a Berkeley variant of Unix. I think you can either use usermod or manually edit /etc/passwd.

I asked ChatGPT how to set the static ip. This is what it said:

Setting up a static IP address on a SPARCstation 5 running Solaris 8 involves several steps. Here's how you can do it:

1. Become the Superuser Before you make changes to the network configuration, you'll need to have superuser privileges. You can switch to the superuser by typing su and entering the root password.

2. Identify the Network Interface Determine the name of the network interface you want to configure. On Solaris, this is typically something like le0 or hme0. You can use the ifconfig -a command to list all interfaces.

3. Set the IP Address Use the ifconfig command to set the static IP address. Replace hme0 with your actual interface name and 192.168.1.100 with the desired IP address.

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   ifconfig hme0 plumb
   
   ifconfig hme0 192.168.1.100 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
   

   The plumb command initializes the interface, and up activates it with the new settings.

4. Set the Default Gateway To set the default gateway, add the route to the system:

   csharpCopy code
   route add default 192.168.1.1
   

   Replace 192.168.1.1 with the IP address of your gateway.

5. Edit the /etc/hosts File Add the static IP address and the corresponding hostname to the /etc/hosts file.

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   192.168.1.100 myhostname.mydomain myhostname
   

6. Edit the /etc/netmasks File If your network uses non-standard netmasks, you may need to add or edit the netmask for your network in the /etc/netmasks file.

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   192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0
   

7. Edit the /etc/defaultrouter File Add the IP address of your default gateway to the /etc/defaultrouter file. This ensures the routing table is properly populated at boot time.

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   192.168.1.1
   

8. Make the Changes Persistent Across Reboots For Solaris 8, you may need to create or edit the hostname file corresponding to your network interface in the /etc directory. This file should be named /etc/hostname.<interface>, for example, /etc/hostname.hme0, with the file containing just the hostname.

9. Restart Network Services You can either restart the network services or simply reboot the system to ensure all settings take effect.

10. Test the Configuration After the system comes back up, test your configuration with ping, netstat, and ifconfig commands to make sure the network is configured correctly.

Be very cautious when performing these actions, as incorrect settings can result in loss of network connectivity. It's also worth noting that Solaris 8 is a very old system, so some commands or file locations might be slightly different. Always check the system documentation or consult with a Solaris 8 expert if you're unsure about the steps.

As for the nsswitch.conf thing, if you don't have a sample nsswitch.conf, you can try this:

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/806-1386/6jam5ahkg/index.html

You will need to find the line with "hosts" and change it to:

hosts: files dns

This will tell Solaris to use "/etc/hosts" then dns. After you reboot, it should work.

Get Outlook for Android

---

From: Jake <jake@spaz.org>
Sent: Wednesday, November 8, 2023 2:06:27 PM
To: sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org <sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org>
Cc: phil <phillipcchin@gmail.com>
Subject: sparcstation progress

 

last night I played with the Sparcstation 5 that Phil got working, and tried
to get it on The Internet

it's plugged into ethernet, and i wanted to get it an IP address and all
that...but first i had to figure out why it didn't have a MAC address.  Its
ethernet port is "le0" (in linux we're used to eth0) and something online said
do this:

# ifconfig le0 plumb

but then its MAC address was 0:0:0:0:0:0 which was not gonna work.  Trying to
set it from ifconfig like this didn't work:

# ifconfig le0 hw ether 1:2:3:4:5:6
bad address

so I had to reboot and type a bunch of stuff into the "ok" prompt it boots up
to, like it says here
https://gist.github.com/amdprophet/e010803d581d676003a90ba36da8a269

after a reboot it started saying the MAC address I entered upon boot (before
the "ok" prompt) and actually it was trying to network boot, or access
something on the network - i had to press STOP and A to interrupt that, and
get the "ok" prompt, where i typed "boot disk" to boot up from disk.

Then I set the IP address and gateway route manually and was able to ping and
telnet sites by IP address, on the internet!!!!  but DNS didn't work.

I put this in /etc/resolv.conf:
domain jackpumpkin
nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.4

and then nslookup worked!  But other commands line ping and telnet and the web
browser still couldn't resolve DNS names.  I went home, but Marc says:
     what does /etc/nsswitch.conf say?
     You might have to do: cp /etc/nsswitch.dns /etc/nsswitch.conf
     if the .conf does not exist

Apparently this OS ships with a bunch of example config files with different
extensions instead of .conf, and you copy the one you want to .conf and then
edit to your liking.  That's probably how we should set up the networking,
rather than typing ifconfig commands each time.

also don't forget to run "bash" in the terminal so you're not stuck in an
annoying minimalist shell

here's the wiki page i made - if you don't have an account, request one!
https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Sparcstation#sparcstation_5

-jake