[rescue] Paging Robert Novak

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sat, 22 Feb 2003, Shawn Wallbridge wrote:

> I have the same board, so I could do it as well. I think I remember
> wgetting their entire ftp server before it went away. I can look at home.

Well, let me go through the whole ordeal again (I think I brought this
up before).  Back in late 1999, I had the idea of building a small
cluster for rendering movies that my roommate was creating in
Persistence of Vision.  PoV lends itself to a great degree of
parallelization.  The idea was to have 6 PPro200 CPUs cranking out
frames, with a SPARC LX sewing them together into an AVI file.

All was great except that I couldn't use largeish IDE discs in the
dual-PPro nodes, and I was too poor to afford SCSI.  I upgraded the
firmware on two of the boards, and they have been toast ever since.

It turns out that Micronics mislabeled the firmware files.  Revisions A
and B of the board are completely incompatible from a firmware
point-of-view, and when I followed the link to download a rev A ROM
file, it gave me a rev B file.  The exact sequence of event was something
like this:

computer: C:\>
      me: a:\flash
computer: filename?
      me: xxxx.bin
computer: backing up flash.
          erasing flash.
          INCOMPATIBLE DEVICE DETECTED
      me: Oh, shit.
computer: programming anyway...
      me: WHAT?  Nooooooo!

So, if you have a 09-00288-03 rev A, I'd really rather get a dump of
whatever's on the chip than a file that was on their FTP site, since
I'll either have to pay MC Howard to reprogram it, or send it to Dave
and soak up his time.

And, no, I don't have the backup ROM file on that floppy.  I've moved
four times since then.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke *) "Microsoft doesent have to be involved in order
Thorndale, TX     (*  for people to be ignorant morons.  It's just a
                  *)  contributing factor."          --Bill Bradford