[rescue] Converting a SunOS 4.1.4 Disk from sun4c to sun4m

[Dave McGuire]

   Loads and does everything else, for that matter.  Yeah I always laugh 
when an excited n00b gets a SPARCstation and gets all excited talking 
about running Solaris 2 on it.  Nobody but the most clueless people or 
companies with very special requirements (mostly embedded) ever ran 
Solaris 2 on those machines back when they were en vogue.

                -Dave

On 6/29/26 09:20, Todd Vernon wrote:
> It’s amazing how fast 4.1.4 loads on SPARCstation 5 compared to Solaris 
> 2.6.
> 
> ---
> Todd Vernon
> Entrepreneur | Investor
> Email: todd at toddvernon.com <mailto:todd at toddvernon.com>
> LinkedIn: toddvernon <https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddvernon/>
> On Jun 28, 2026 at 1:51 PM -0600, Dave McGuire via rescue 
> <rescue at sunhelp.org>, wrote:
>> On 6/28/26 14:31, Todd Vernon via rescue wrote:
>>> Got my Sun 4.1.4 image to boot up on my SPARCstation 5 and QEMU
>>> yesterday,  thought I would share the
>>> article, I see 4.1.4 stuff float around here from time to time.
>>>
>>> https://oldsilicon.com/technologies/sunos-414-sun4c-to-sun4m-graft/
>>
>> An excellent write-up.
>>
>> At Digex in the 1990s, where we were maintaining a few thousand Sun
>> machines, we maintained the "Digex standard load" of SunOS4. It
>> contained all of our local patches and configurations, got rid of NIS
>> and other bad ideas, installed local builds of a few hundred packages, 
>> etc.
>>
>> It was an "all karch" load. We replaced /usr/kvm with as symlink to
>> /usr/kvm-sun4, /usr/kvm-sun4c, or /usr/kvm-sun4m. OS copy scripts
>> created and copied the filesystems, created that symlink as appropriate,
>> took care of the bootstraps and the karch-specific kernel. The
>> filesystem copies were done with async writes turned on. It all worked
>> very well; we could have a new system up and running in about ten minutes.
>>
>> The standard load machines (sparc-proto.digex.net and
>> m68k-proto.digex.net, would be called "golden" nowadays) were air-gapped
>> and kept in cipherlock room. We would occasionally physically connect
>> them to the network to do rdist runs for installation of new software
>> and md5 comparisons of files. (that was one of our local modifications
>> to rdist, along with Kerberos integration)
>>
>> We did the same thing with 68K-based machines, with /usr/kvm-sun3 and
>> /usr/kvm-sun3x.
>>
>> -Dave
>>
>> --
>> Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
>> New Kensington, PA
>>
>>
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>> rescue list - http://sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue_sunhelp.org


-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA