IEEE Wireless Seminar at OGI and Ultra10 Disassembly

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 23:59:59 -800

At the very beginning of the day (around midnight after I got back from Belly
Dancing) I pulled out my old Ultra10 and decided to fix all the hardware
problems once and for all. The machine had a weird problem where it would
crash Solaris with complaints about E$ checksum failures. Originally I thought
that my machine might be a victim of the UltraSparc-II E$ problem, but this is
a IIi and thus not part of the official hit list. The CPU is 120x3 = 360MHz;
a 120MHz FSB is quite fast for a vintage 1998 machine. Anyhow, when I
discovered this problem two years ago, I swapped in a 90x4 = 360MHz CPU from
an Ultra5. This arrangement mostly worked, except if the case was open, in
which case the machine refused to boot. Unhappy with that, I
tore apart the machine in a
last-ditch attempt to get it running again. Turns out it was the RAM. I
swapped a bunch of funny DIMMs for the four 50ns DIMMs in the Ultra5 and the
system has been fine since then. Knock on wood.