Concurrent Computer Corporation

[Pontus Pihlgren]

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