Octane2 number-in-a-can programming

[jackal]

Hi folks! New Octane2 owner here. Arrived without a NIC button on the frontplane so I can't use the network for lack of a MAC NIC. Gather that these are just iButtons so should be fairly trivial to program.

https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Number_In_a_Can seems to provide good information what is expected to be there. Do we think this is the totality of what would need to be written? Do we have an existing dump of the contents of a frontplane button? At $4 a pop for a DS1982 this isn't an expensive experiment, but at the same time I'd love to have something to compare against before I try to write the one-time-programmable device.

I think I have someone who's programming one for me already, but all the same I'd love to know in case I need to do it myself in future.

 

[miod]

I can't seem to find dumps around, maybe I got rid of them.

The DS1982 presents four memory pages of 256 bits each (32 bytes). But the chip contains more than four pages, there is a redirection table in the chip which tells which actual page to access for a given logical page; I don't know if your programming tools make this transparent for you, or if you'll need to set up the redirect memory (in the status data at offset 1 - factory defaults should be 0xff, 0xff, 0xff, 0xff which mean no redirection yet for pages 0 to 3).

You at least need to put in memory page 0 (or whichever page the redirect table for page 0 points to):

- 10 (0x0a) in the first byte, it's probably a length value for what follows.
- whatever you want in the next four bytes (might be a crc or a checksum though, or a serial number - i don't know).
- the MAC address, in reverse order (i.e. 0x56, 0x34, 0x12, 0x69, 0x00, 0x08 for 08:00:69:12:34:56) in the next six bytes.

 

[weblacky]

Hi folks! New Octane2 owner here. Arrived without a NIC button on the frontplane so I can't use the network for lack of a MAC NIC. Gather that these are just iButtons so should be fairly trivial to program.

https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Number_In_a_Can seems to provide good information what is expected to be there. Do we think this is the totality of what would need to be written? Do we have an existing dump of the contents of a frontplane button? At $4 a pop for a DS1982 this isn't an expensive experiment, but at the same time I'd love to have something to compare against before I try to write the one-time-programmable device.

I think I have someone who's programming one for me already, but all the same I'd love to know in case I need to do it myself in future.

Too much work, please contact Douglas Mashek @ http://www.mashek.com/index.php

Or

Ian Mapleson @ http://sgidepot.co.uk/sgi.html (If you're outside USA)

And just buy one. There have been hundreds of thousands of scrapped SGI octane's and I'm sure either of these guys has a spare "number in a can" button for you that you can use. It was the removable module that you're supposed to take with you when you change octane systems to keep your software licenses intact, that's why they made it removable.

Nobody's bothered to figure out how to make one because there's just so many of them, it's not worth it.

Hopefully you can buy one for like $35 bucks or something....

 

[jackal]

Good point, I had just assumed it would be difficult to source but it sounds like that's a good option. Thanks!

miod thanks for the info as well. I'd be lying if I said I didn't still want to try to clone one, but it'll definitely be on the backburner now.

 

[Jacques]

I may still have one floating around from when I had some donor Octanes. I could check?

 

[jackal]

I think I just snagged one, but absolutely thanks for the offer <3

 

[bplaa.yai]

Welcome @miod , good to see veterans here !