Continued Use
The component of the Indy most prone to failure is the Nidec/Power General power supply. New power supplies are manufactured by Sony and sold through resellers; however, they are expensive.
The Indy's Ethernet address, which doubles as the system's serial number, is stored in battery-backed RAM. This means that when the internal battery dies, so does the system—it will hang at the PROM monitor and refuse to boot any further as a result of the Ethernet address being reset to FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF (expressed in hexadecimal). A competent user can replace the PROM battery and reprogram it. The original battery was made by Dallas Semiconductor, now a division of Maxim Integrated Products. The original unit was marked the "DS-1386-8K-150"; however, its replacement unit, the "DS-1386-8K-120," can be directly substituted with no ill effects.
One can set a new MAC address from the Command Monitor with the command "setenv -f eaddr xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx". The -f switch here will force the new MAC address. The MAC address is (usually) on a sticker to the rear of the unit, and hence can be reprogrammed without losing software licences, which often rely on it to verify ownership. Otherwise, any MAC address in SGI's block is usable.
(Originally based upon Alex's SGI page (PageMirror), public domain as of September 7, 2003)
Read more about this topic: SGI Indy
Famous quotes related to continued use:
“The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.”
—Njabulo Ndebele (b. 1948)