I have recently come across a perfectly decent sun sparcstation 10 machine, everything seems physically intact and healhty (I got it for a $1.06 US!) I don't have a monitor, keyboard, mouse for it, but the 10BaseT NIC leads me to think I should be able to find some boot floppy disk that will load this thing up and initialize an sshd that I can ssh into and start working on the box.

Sounds like a very reasonable possibility, but I can't find any good info on it... Any suggestions of where I can get a sparcstation 10 aware floppy image that is meant to boot a machine with only power and network connections, and get me an sshd waiting for me to take it from there?

Any help would be fantastic!

Thanks!

unless ssh is setup and you know any passwords, it would be extremely hard to setup without a monitor, and or another computer that you can edit files on the disk with.

That's specifically what I'm asking about... Some simple linux boot disk that has a real light kernel and a real simple sshd server that I can edit the .conf file before making the image to give the root a password and the machine an IP and router. This way, the machine boots silently into the floppy, starts up the sshd and waits for a log in. Once I'm in, maybe I can mount a volume via NFS or load more floppies to continue with an installation.

Any ideas?

I've been continuing to research this topic, although I've had little success so far. One link I found to be interesting is a discussion about openBSD and setting up a sparc 5 to be bootable over the network, the link can be found at:

http://legonet.org/~griffin/openbsd/

Although there is something to be desired with the info it gives... the link specific for the topic is available when you click on:

Netbooting the OpenBSD/sparc install on a Sun SparcStation 5

Still interested in some info out there!

I think I'll try to use a serial console, although I have *very* limited experience wih that.