unsigned long geek = random();

The one year warranty on my MacBook Pro is due to expire in a few weeks, so I’m thinking of investing in AppleCare to extend it by a further two years. AppleCare is rather expensive though, particularly for laptops - $399 (£ 279) for my model if bought from the online Apple Store.

There are a number of sellers offering the same plan for roughly half price on eBay, $199 Buy It Now. Positive feedback for these sellers is close to 100% and, as AppleCare is a worldwide warranty, it seems like a smart move to buy from them, rather than from Apple. Read the auctions more closely and things start to sound a little fishy though. The majority of the sellers who sell a lot of AppleCare packages provide the serial number electronically, rather than providing the retail package or any official paperwork from Apple. Only the serial number is required to activate the warranty, but surely the retail package should be available, if requested? Although the serial number provided may activate the warranty, how do we know that it wasn’t generated by a serial number generator?

I think in this case I’m going to be more prudent and pay a little bit more to buy an AppleCare plan that comes in the proper retail package - there are a number of sellers on eBay offering them and they’re also available from a number of reputable online retailers. The prices aren’t as low, but at least I’ll be more comfortable that I’m buying a legitimate product.

With our recent acquisition of a number of Sun Ultra 60s, Jonathan and I have been doing a fair amount of CPU swapping to max out our machines.

Something odd that we’ve both noticed is that when we put a 450Mhz CPU into a machine that we didn’t receive with a 450Mhz CPU, it wouldn’t boot up. There’s no mention of CPU speed jumpers in the service manual, so we both put it down to different motherboard revisions, phases of the moon and the lack of a chicken sacrifice.

A few days ago I discovered the Sun 450 MHz UltraSPARC-II Module Upgrade guide, which details the CPU speed jumper settings for the Ultra 60 (see pages 3-5 and 3-6). Bah. Why doesn’t Sun bother documenting these things in the service manual?

I’ve been network booting SPARC systems for a while now, ever since my last run in with a faulty floppy drive on a SPARCstation 2. NetBSD makes it easy - the standard installation includes a diskless client filesystem which can simply be extracted onto the boot server. It wasn’t quite so straightforward with FreeBSD, so here are a few pointers…

My boot server is running NetBSD 3.1 and I booted FreeBSD 6.2, so if you’re using different software you may need to make some adjustments. YMMV.

1. On the boot server, configure rarpd(8) as usual, adding the entry for your machine’s MAC address to /etc/ethers. For example (for a machine called test02):
   08:00:20:b2:2f:b6 test02
2. Extract the FreeBSD base fileset to the appropriate location on your boot server (for example, /export/install/fb62_sp64).
3. Extract the FreeBSD GENERIC kernel fileset to boot/ in your diskless filesystem.
4. Within your diskless root, symlink boot/GENERIC to boot/kernel (boot/GENERIC is a directory that contains the kernel and its modules).
5. Put boot/loaders from the diskless filesystem into your tftp root directory and symlink it to your machine’s IP address in hex. For example, the filename for 192.168.1.92 is C0A8015C.
6. Export your diskless root filesystem via NFS and add the necessary dhcpd.conf stanza. For example:
host test02.pimp.org.za {
hardware ethernet 08:00:20:b2:2f:b6;
fixed-address 192.168.1.92;
option host-name "test02";
option root-path "/export/install/fb62_sp64";
}
7. Boot your machine - “boot net” from the PROM should do it.

A few tips:

• It’s normally a good idea to update the machine’s OpenBoot PROM to the latest release. Old PROMs often have subtle bugs.
• Extracting FreeBSD filesets is simple:
cat 6.2-RELEASE/base/base.* > /tmp/base.tar.gz
tar -xzvpf /tmp/base.tar.gz -C /export/install/fb62_sp4


Update: Fixed incorrect command to extract sets (thanks John Messenger!)

Thanks to a lead from Mark, I now have even more Sun Ultra 60s - another five, for the princely total of R450 (about $60). They are of varying hardware specification, but I have 1×300Mhz CPU, 2×360Mhz CPUs and 2×450Mhz CPUs, somewhere in the region of 2.5GiB RAM and a few 4 and 9GiB disks. All the machines have dual width Elite3D framebuffers. All in all, a pretty good deal

My plan is to put together at least two dual CPU machines, one running FreeBSD and another probably running OpenSolaris. *sigh* If only NetBSD supported SMP on 64-bit SPARC systems.

Yes, it’s true - I’ve switched to a Mac running OS X as my primary home workstation. For the past few years I’ve been running NetBSD on sparc64 systems, but felt that it was time for a change. Something in particular that’s really annoyed me is that Firefox still isn’t stable on 64-bit big-endian platforms - I had to resort to running it on a NetBSD/alpha system and displaying it locally.

It’s still early days, but I’m impressed with how everything Just Works under OS X. It’s not quite a traditional Unix system (NeXT always was a bit different, NetInfo for example), but a Mach kernel, a mostly-FreeBSD userland and a pretty GUI is good enough for me Of course, I’m still keeping my Ultra 60 running NetBSD as my second head - just need to get Synergy configured so that I can talk to both machines with a single keyboard and mouse.

A few weeks ago I collected some more Sun hardware from a friend of mine who seems to know the location of the best dumpsters in town. It was quite a collection: a pair of Ultra 60s, a Ultra 2, a pair of Ultra 1s, a Sun 8mm tape drive and a StorEdge L280 DLT changer.

One of the Ultra 60s had a single 360Mhz CPU, 1GiB RAM, a 9GiB disk, gigabit Ethernet and a pair of Creator3Ds. The other had a single 360Mhz CPU, 512MiB RAM, a pair of 18GiB drives and a single Creator3D. The Ultra 2 only had a single 200Mhz CPU, but had 512MiB RAM. The Ultra 1s were pretty low end - both had 143Mhz CPUs, 64MiB RAM and a quad fast ethernet and one had a 2GiB disk, the other being diskless.

I’ve given the one Ultra 60 and the Ultra 2 to Jonathan Groll and the Ultra 1s will probably be given to some deserving homes amongst CLUG members. My Ultra 60 is already running NetBSD-current (currently 4.99.4 kernel and userland) and working well, but more on that in a later post.

It’s incredible, but a few years ago it was impossible to get any moderately decent Sun hardware locally, but these days it seems to be falling from the sky. At rough count I currently have 13 unused Sun machines (6×32-bit, 7×64-bit). Now I just need to get myself a nice Blade 1000, 2000 or 2500 and I’ll be a very happy camper. Of course NetBSD still needs to get working sparc64 SMP and UltraSPARC-III CPU support, but that’s minor stuff

On Sunday I finally managed to get OpenSolaris installed on my “spare” Sun Ultra 2. Finally for a number of reasons:

• It took me a while to get the machine back together again with a working disk and the correct RAM. 200-pin DSIMMs are not the easiest things to add and remove.
• I have a distinct shortage of decent sized 1″ SCA disks. I eventually found a 7,200rpm 9GiB Western Digital drive that used to be in my AlphaServer 800 and used that.
• I needed to update the PROM to boot a 64-bit kernel, which took some time as I had to hunt down a hard disk with Solaris already installed in order to boot the PROM updater.
• Solaris is not quick to install using a 12x CD-ROM drive (the fastest I had at hand - didn’t feel like digging in the parts bin outside for a faster one).
• Slicing the disk incorrectly is not a Good Thing - the first install failed after /usr ran out of space.

After all that:
[1] mj@skunkworks:~$ uname -a
SunOS skunkworks 5.11 snv_52 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2


Not the fastest machine (single 300Mhz UltraSPARC-II CPU, 512MiB RAM), but it runs well.

On Saturday I got two Sun UltraSPARC systems from a friend, in exchange for my unused SGI O2. Although the O2 was a great little machine, I hadn’t used it for about a year and SGI’s poor support for IRIX (ie no easy way for me to get patches) meant it would probably have languished in my pile of unused systems for a while longer.

The two systems I got were an Ultra 10, 333Mhz, 256MiB, 9GiB IDE, Creator3D and an Ultra 2, 300Mhz, 256MiB, Creator3D and no disks. I’ve already stripped my Ultra 5 and put its RAM, SCSI controller, disk and USB 2.0 card into the Ultra 10 and it seems noticeably faster - probably a combination of the Creator3D and the extra cache on the 333Mhz CPU (2MiB vs the 256KiB on the Ultra 5’s 360Mhz).

The Ultra 10 is running NetBSD-current (4.99.1) and once Solaris 10 Update 3 has been released, I’ll be installing it on the Ultra 2.