Sun gotcha's

This is not exhaustive. It's my notes, really.

Hardware:

40 MHz Sun Sparcstation 2
32 MB RAM
424 MB hard drive

Installation

CDROM: Trying to use my toshiba yielded really funky results, both under SunOS 4.1.1. From the "Ok" bios prompt, I could probe-scsi the thing, at it looked ok. I could boot vmunix off of a CD. After that, everything went to hell. I'd get this:

esp0:   data transfer overrun
        State=DATA Last State=RESEL
        Latched stat=0x11 intr=0x10 fifo 0x80
        last msg out: ; last msg in: IDENTIFY
        DMA csr=0x94400010
        addr=ff095000 last=ff094800 last_count=800
        Cmd dump for Target 6 Lun 0:
        cdb=[ 0x8 0x0 0x0 0x10 0x10 0x0 ]
        pkt_state 0xf pkt_flags 0x0 pkt_statistics 0x1
        cmd_flags=0x25 cmd_timeout 180
        Mapped Dma Space:
                Base = 0xff0ae000 Count = 0x2000
        Transfer History:
                Base = 0xff0ae000 Count = 0x2000
        SCSI transport failed: reason 'data_ovr': retrying command

esp0:   Target 3 now Synchronous at 4.0 mb/s max transmit rate
esp0:   data transfer overrun
        State=DATA Last State=DATAT

I found an archived news posting that suggested this kind of error was because the CDROM drive (a Toshiba in my case) had a blocksize greater than the OS'. In the posting, it mentioned that his was, I think, 8192 bytes, and that Sun's is, I think, 512 bytes. Ick. I fixed this by getting a sun-compatible CDROM drive.