Hi Don,

A while back you gave me some advice about fixing my ailing Sun Ultra 2
workstation. Well, shortly after that it died completely. I posted
another reply in the "Shopmade grinder with winch" thread but I had to
use Google Groups. I think you may have missed the message if you're
blocking messages from Google Groups.

The same thing has now happened to me twice. With the first workstation,
it worked for about 10 days after the clock stopped keeping time. This
time, it worked for about a month. It leads me to believe that Ultra 2
clock problems are perhaps most often caused by motherboard faults as
opposed to a dead NVRAM battery. Anyway, I have now managed to build a
working Ultra 2 from parts with 2048 MB RAM. 2048 MB seems to make the
Ultra 2 slightly faster than it was with 1280 MB. I notice it when the
machine is booting up, which surprises me as I would have expected boot
speed to be limited by hard disk speed.

This means that perhaps my old NVRAM chips are worth preserving. You
mentioned a piece of software which could be used to stop the NVRAM
clock. I searched but couldn't find it online. Looking at the NVRAM
datasheet, it seems like it is not something which can be done with a
crocodile clip. The only reference I could find was for modifying the
contents of an ancient sun4c machine's NVRAM at the "ok" prompt, and I
couldn't immediately see how to use this information with a sun4u Ultra
2. Do you know of a source for software which can be used to stop the
NVRAM clock?

I think that's all there was of importance in the post. I speculated a
little about whether common applications such as Firefox and Nautilus
are able to make good use of multiple processors on Sun workstations.
I'm still not certain. But I think that's all.

Thanks for the help.

Best wishes,

Chris