[Suns-at-Home] ultra-1 nvram question

[Craig Dewick]

On Sat, 17 Mar 2007, Arthur Wouk wrote:

> my ultra-1 no longer keeps time when i remove power. however, when i boot, it
> still has the ethernet address properly listed in the boot banner, not the
> feared ff:ff:ff:ff.  so, is my battery dead, or is something else going on?

Yes it means the internal lithium cell (that keeps the internal real-time 
clock going and retains the contents of the internal static RAM powered) 
has run out of charge.

All the 1st and 2nd general Ultrasparc machines use 48T59 NVRAM's - you 
can program a new one yourself using simple Forth language commands (since 
the OBP firmware is basically a program running in a Forth interpreter).

Craig.

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