[rescue] Fixing the NVRAM battery in the SS5

[Bryan Gurney]

My SS5 110 MHz has a nagging problem where its clock lags way behind the  
actual time.  I don't turn it on that much (I really should; it's a nice  
quiet box and could tuck away out of sight nicely if given enough  
airflow), but when I do, the clock is behind.  It can range from days to  
months behind, depending on how long the box has been powered off.

It's my first Sun box, and it's been like this ever since I first rescued  
it in mid-2004, but I can't shake the feeling that someday the NVRAM is  
going to go completely, and the thing won't boot.  Who sells the things to  
fix, and what FORTH programming do I have to run through?

The SS5 is the slowest of my three Suns (GEDDIT?!), which includes an  
Ultra 2 with 2 300MHz CPUs, 640 MB of RAM, and a 24-bit framebuffer, and  
an Ultra 5 with 1024 MB of RAM and a 440 MHz CPU.  The two fastest boxes  
run Solaris 10, but the SS5 is on Debian Sarge right now.  I haven't tried  
OpenBSD on it yet, mostly because you either need to buy the CD or have  
the box hooked up to the Internet.


Other dumb question to throw in the mix: is anyone making flash drives  
that hook up to 80-pin SCA?  That would make for a seriously quiet  
Sparcstation, and not having to worry about hard drives failing as much  
(but I think that flash memory does go corrupt over time, and I've heard  
that it's not as conducive to having data pushed all over the place).