[Suns-at-Home] Sparcstation 1 problems

[der Mouse]

> I just powered up my sparcstation 1 after a few weeks of downtime,
> and the initial screen comes up with an ethernet address and hostid
> of all f's.  Have I had a battery failure?

Yes.  The battery in the clock/NVRAM chip has run down.

> Is there anything I can do to reset the system?

Yes.

The expensive but permanent fix is a new clock chip; I don't know where
to get one offhand, but somewhere on the NetBSD/sparc webpages there's
a pointer to a FAQ that says.  (Start at
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/sparc if you want to look for it.)

I've seen it said that it's possible to slice open the chip and replace
the battery.  I've never tried it myself.

It's possible to reset those values in your current clock chip, though
with a dead battery you'll lose the changes at next power-down.  The
recipe in my wetware memory says that you want something like this:

- Pick an Ethernet address.  The recipe below assumes you pick
  fe:ed:de:ad:fa:ce (you probably want to actually pick something
  beginning 8:0:20, since that's Sun's prefix; if you have the MAC
  address the machine used to have, that's best because it drastically
  reduces the chance of collision with another machine's address).

- Pick a serial number.  Express it in hex.  The recipe below assumes
  you pick 12648430 (in hex, c0ffee).

- Do the following:

	ok 0 0 mkp
	ok fe ed de ad fa ce c0ffee mkpl

  At this point the machine will appear to hang.  It's actually waiting
  for input; type control-D and control-R.  If you get the ok prompt,
  everything is fine (type "banner" to get it to reprint the banner to
  check).  If you get a copyright notice, start over only with a
  different value in place of the first 0 on the first line (try 1, 7,
  ff, 3e, whatever).

This works for a SS2 at one of my workplaces; I think the SS1's ROMs
are similar enough for it to work on the 1 too.

					der Mouse

			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
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