30 Jul
2016
30 Jul
'16
11:35 a.m.
On Sat, Jul 30, 2016 at 01:58:49PM -0400, alexmcwhirter at triadic.us wrote:
I know nothing about this machine in particular, but i
know a decent amount
about other unix machines of the era. Chances are that the copy of RTU on
that box is licensed to the serial / id number programmed in nvram. Because
the nvram is dead, those numbers no longer match and the OS panics from an
invalid license.
I think you may very well be right. I noticed that the "show" command in
the console displays the serial number. I went back and compared it with
the serial number printed on the back of the machine. Well, it doesn't
match one bit. So.. I either need to figure out to reprogram the NVRAM
(simply set serial_number doesn't work and the manual lists the
environment variable as "permanent") or I suppose I could figure out
where on disk the serial number is.. but it doesn't sound easy.
The TOD clock typically part of the nvram chip and
loses
it's value after every reset. If i had to guess, i would say replace the
battery / nvram chip (if it's a self contained chip like the old sun boxes)
and see if you can get enough data together to reprogram it. Whether or not
the machine in question has a facility to do that like the old sun's do i am
not sure.
I've battled the NVRAM death and corresponding TOD problems in SGI, SUN
and DEC machines before but only succeded because the "set"
functionality of the console was enough... this time I'm not so sure.
/P