A long story about 3rd party equipment and Suns (tortur

[Farooq Butt]

Here is a little story which may be of interest to comp.sys.sun users.
Please direct any bouquets/brickbats to me personally.

It was a dark and stormy day outside Boston when our 3/280S finally
arrived.  True to our graduate student heritage our group hurriedly ripped
off the various wrappings and cartons and proceeded down the ominous path
of bolting together the various components we had ordered.  In order to
save our company some greenbacks * , we had ordered a highly ...>ahem<...
nonstandard configuration: 

* $55,000 to be exact.

    1. 3/280s (i.e. CPU board, 8M memory, 2nd ethernet, ALM and "fridge")
    2. Xylogics 753 controllers (up to 4 spindles)
    3. Xylogics 472 tape controller
    4. VME <--> Multibus Adapter (Sun supplied for 472 ctlr)
    5. Random 3rd party 6U -> 9U adapters for Xylogics 753 ctrlrs 
    6. Randomly supplied CDC 92-185-02V tapedrive 
    7. Randomly supplied 781Mbyte Fujitsu M2372K microdisks 
    8. 8M auxilliary memory from Clearpoint 
    9. Cabling for drives (both tape and disk) from Arrow Electronics

We knew the task ahead of us was not going to be an easy one so we girded
up our loins.  Noted social commentator and Sun guru extraordinaire Frank
Bull had apparently hooked up Fuji M2372K's before and armed with his list
of DIP switch settings (posted to sun spots some time ago) we started
preparing our disks to be "Sunified."  The server was powered up and after
some minor EEPROM surgery we had it sending output to ttya and had hooked
up a tvi950 terminal to it.  Everything looked great!  The diagnostics
showed that all the internal tests were being passed and that the system
seemed to be working OK.  Unfortunately at this point only the boards we
had actually purchased from Sun were installed.  Feeling happy that our
server's brains had not been fried by Joe's delivery agency we got four
burly guys together to help install our CDC tape drive.  CDC apparently
believes in the value of 'good ol' American Steel'  and their tape drives
weigh in at about 160 lbs.   Herniated and happy we switched on the tape
drive and lo and behold it worked, the internal diagnostics proclaimed
that all was OK. After that victory we installed the Xylogics 472 ctlr
into its VME<-> Multibus adapter and plugged it into  the VME bus.  MUNIX
came up OK but it would not see the tape ctlr no matter what we did.  In
desparation we called Sun genius Mr. Jim Dion of Sun Microsystems who duly
informed us that the VME<->Multibus adapter supplied by Sun had 12 (count
em' !) banks of DIP switches and that we had almost certainly
misconfigured them.  As  it turned out since we had ordered our tape ctlr
from Xylogics and our VME<->Multibus adapter from Sun, Sun had
conveniently assumed that it was supplied on a "spare-part" basis and
supplied absolutely NO documentation with it !  With the help of Mr. Dion
we managed to configure the 472 correctly and actually saw it appear as a
device during the boot sequence. The Clearpoint memory board was installed
quickly thereafter and gave us no problems. 

Feeling elated by our victory over the forces of darkness, we looked
around at ourselves and saw that it was time for the "real-man" stuff.
Enough of this quiche-eating messing about with devices that are known and
supported, we had to now venture into the unfamiliar terrain of
unsupported/unacknowledged devices....in short, we had to hook up the
Fujis.  Well, we know others had done it and that made us feel good.
Little did we know what horrors awaited us.  Hooking up the Xylogics 753
boards in their 6U<->9U adapters (the xy753 as opposed to the Sun 7053 is
basically the same board but it is much smaller) was simple.  A quick
glance at the MUNIX boot sequence showed that all was well in kernel-land
and that we had successfully fooled SunOS into thinking that there was a
7053 on our VME bus.  

Hooking up the cables was a little weird since we had not done it on
Micro-SMD devices such as the Xy753 ctlr but other than that it was not
particularly difficult.  We went with one disk to be safe and thought that
our task was done.  Power on....controller shows  up but no
disks....panic. Oh oh, we realized, silly us we had forgotten to put a
terminating resistor pack (55ohmsx4) on the drive, so we dug up four
resistor ICs and installed them on the drive and powered up again. No
change. I made a frantic call to Frank Bull who indicated that I may  have
mis-set my jumpers on the 753 ctlr.  The 753 was pulled out and Frank went
over the jumpers with me.  Everything looked OK. What *could* be the
matter?  In desparation, we checked the A & B cables for connectivity,
they seemed fine.  The answer, we felt must lie in the drive if the ctlr
is showing up on the boot bus-probe and if both its DIPs and the cables
are OK.  Another frantic call to Frank who patiently went over the disk
drive DIPs with me.   They seemed to be set just fine.  What could the
answer be?  With the 50 lb disk on my lap cutting deep gashes into my
thighs, I suddenly knew !! It *must* be the jumpers on the drive !! I
checked the drive jumpers against Frank and sure enough a couple were out
of whack. I modified them to suit what I was told works  and plugged the
drive back into the chassis.  No dice.  This was getting desparate and if
I didn't get this beast up I know that both my partner and myself would be
given the figurative Soweto-Burning-Radial-Tire necklace by our company
for having had the audacity to think that we were a third-party system
integration house.   What were we to to do?

The computer is OK...it boots fine it sees every board that is plugged
into it.  It sometimes has a little trouble telling how much memory it has
installed but that's OK since MUNIX comes up just fine off tape.  But you
can't be too safe so I called Mr. Sun Genius Jim Dion in again to swap
what we felt was a flaky CPU board on a brand-new machine.  The swap took
place and our minor memory flakiness went away.  The disks, I was sure at
this point, would now be "seen" and we would light up the Benson & Hedges
and ride off into the sunset. No such luck.  I was now at the end of my
tether and I called Frank in Arizona again with a sob story.  We went over
the facts: Good computer (since it sees every device, boots MUNIX, passes
DIAG and "feels" OK), good ctlr (since it "shows up" on a bus probe), good
cabling (checked by an ohmmeter) and presumably a good disk.  This last
fact was a tad shaky so in order to be absolutely certain we plugged the
disk in question into a Stratus computer and it worked beautifully.  This
was getting strange.   Well, we  re-checked all the DIPs and jumpers but
after calling Fujitsu we found out that the on-board jumpers control rev.
level and shouldn't be touched.  Apparently the reason my jumpers and
Frank's had disagreed was because of board rev.  I changed all the jumpers
back to what they were and tried to see if that made a difference. No way
Jose, same as always, the computer came up, did a bus probe, we saw the
753 ctrlr but no drives appreared. Back to the drawing board.

It was at this time we did the smartest thing of all, namely to call in a
hardware type person who came armed with a scope and logic-analyzer.  It
took our hardware nut about 3 hrs to determine that the chips on the disk
were oscillating wildly, indicating that the drive was not receiving
control signals from the 753.  But how could that be? The cables were fine
and the 753 seemed to check out OK.  Well we plugged in our spare 753
hoping that maybe, just maybe, our 753 had been brain-damaged somehow and
that replacing it with another would help.  Same as ever, the darn disk
drives refused to show and the drive chips oscillated.  After much logic
analysis of the drive we moved our probe to the first diode on the 753
which is supposed to be live at -12V.  There seemed to be no juice. OH
NO!!!! We ripped off the front panel of the Sun and quickly went to work
probing its power supply.  YEP!! NO -12V DC !!!  We had found the guilty
party, apparently none of the Sun-supplied equipment was in the least bit
bothered by the lack of -12V or even -5V.  The only piece of equipment
that needed it and did not get it was the 753.  It had used the +5V to
drive its "brains" and had actually come up as a legit device but it
needed -12V to control our disks.  We changed power supplies and our Sun
worked like a champ.  I won't forget that one in a hurry.  Besides being a
generally humiliating experience it taught a software engineer  that
computrons are not the only things and that sometime electrons are also
important!

Thanks to Bob Wise, Pete Clemson, Jim Dion and Frank Bull for 
putting up with my/our exasperation. 

     Farooq Butt 
     fmbutt at cloud9.UUCP 
     (508) 460-2798 - Stratus Computer, Marlboro MA.