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Sun (System)
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Sun (Solar System) , and more.
Sun (Solar System) , and more.
Procedure to 'kick start' a new MK48T02 NVRAM clock chip on Sun 3/80 WARNING : This procedure is intended to be used on new, blank NVRAM chips only. If you are using it on an existing NVRAM (for some unknown reason) you should follow the procedures described in 'Backing up your NVRAM'. This procedure shouldn't normally be necessary as SunOS provides this functionality as part of the normal clock initialisation. However, it may prove useful in unforeseen circumstances. The step numbers correspond to the step numbers in the SGS-Thomson data sheet procedure for 'kick starting' the clock. The data sheet warns NOT to leave the kick start bit set to 1 for normal use as this will cause excessive current drain and shorten the life of the battery.
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The initial design for what became Sun's first Unix workstation was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He originally designed this "68000 Unix system" for the Stanford University Network communications project, building it from spare parts resourced from the Department of Computer Science and Silicon Valley supply houses.[7]
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Sun has a licensing deal with SCO for some of the UNIX code but has repeatedly said it will indemnify its customers for all Solaris Operating Systems. The company said it is taking additional steps to adding as much of the UNIX IP to its portfolio as it can for Solaris.
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This FAQ is ... distributed as part of a larger package for spoofing the hostid on Sun workstations called change-sun-hostid. In particular, parts of change-sun-hostid can be used to modify the apparent hostid for some or all processes on a UNIX system without messing with the NVRAM. This package even provides a way to make a host seem to have multiple hostids (different processes see different hostids). If you are interested in changing your hostid to deal with software licence issues, you should probably try the scripts/programs in this package first, as most of them don't make permanent changes to a chip on your motherboard. Changing the NVRAM should be a last resort. You can retrieve this package from:
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During the dot-com bubble, Sun experienced dramatic growth in revenue, profits, share price, and expenses. Some part of this was due to genuine expansion of demand for web-serving cycles, but another part was synthetic, fueled by venture capital-funded startups building out large, expensive Sun-centric server presences in the expectation of high traffic levels that never materialized. The share price in particular increased to a level that even the company's executives were hard-pressed to defend. In response to this business growth, Sun expanded aggressively in all areas: head-count, infrastructure, and office space.
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Every Sun 3/80, sun4c, sun4u, and sun4m architecture machine contains an NVRAM chip (not to be confused with the NVRAM in Prestoserve). This NVRAM chip stores various configuration parameters (e.g. boot device, amount of RAM to test), maintains the clock, and ... contains the IDPROM data, which is composed of the ethernet address, date of manufacture, hostid, a version number, and a checksum. The name IDPROM is historical. On older machines such as the sun2, sun3, and sun4 architecture machines the hostid and ethernet address were stored in a PROM called the IDPROM.
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Sun (System)