I recently acquired a Sun Netra T1 105 to play with. A few eBay purchases later and I had 512MB of RAM and a couple of 9GB Compaq SCA drives installed. Debian is pretty well supported for sparcs so that’s what I chose to install. The install was done over serial console as this box doesn’t have keyboard or framebuffer support.
After netbooting a kernel image following the instructions here the rest of the install was just a normal Debian install.
After the install and rebooting the machine I was greeted with a trap 3e error and an ok prompt. From googling it looks like this is a common problem with several possible causes. The fix that worked for me was to put a small script in nvram (I LOVE real server-class hardware).
ok nvedit
0: probe-all install-console banner
1: probe-scsi install-console banner
2: ” Working around Trap 3e” type cr
3: boot^c
ok nvstore
ok reset-all
Note: line 3 is “boot” followed by a Ctrl-c to get back to the ok prompt
For some reason on this machine I had to do a probe-all followed by a probe-scsi for it to pick up the SCSI drives reliably after poweron.
The combination of a LOM (Lights Out Management) module and OBP (Open Firmware Prom) make for easy server management.
This website is now hosted on this machine in my basement.