AGS+ questions

I have three AGS+ routers in my home museum (at least the cover plates say AGS+). Two of them have a PC board above the metal plate at the top that is connected only by a ribbon cable and does not plug into the bus. The one (#2) without the board is a "minimal" system with only a CSC/4 and CSC/ENVM board and a CSC-2E2T board. The others have 5 io boards: #3 has FDDI, 6 ethernet and 8 (4+4) token ring, the #1 machine is 14 (2+6+6) ethernet and 4 serial. Both #1 & #3 have the CCTL2 board to support newer io boards.

Questions/problems:

1) units #1 and #3 fail while booting, repeatedly, but after ~60 minutes (#3) or ~75 minutes (#1), they make it through a boot, and then continue to function through reloads, as long as power is maintained. If power is turned off, even briefly, they go into a reboot cycles again. Is there a solution to this? (maybe question 4 below). The followingt error messages are displayed below. I don't think the checksome directly causes the reboot, but it may complicat things. The cycle for #1 is pretty quick, but that for #3 is very long, it will sit with the console idle for a LONG time (I got 164K of console log for #1 but only 18K of console log for #3): #1 Exception: Software forced crash at 0x1385C6 (PC) #3 ENVM checksum (47 != 56) at offset 0x1 #3 Local Timeout (control reg=0x110) Error, address: 0xFFFFFFFF at 0x2ADAA (PC)

2) #3 does not recognize the ethernet card, even when I put in the ethernet board from the other machine that did work there, it also doesn't recognize one of the token ring cards. (see below, I think I know the answer to this)

3) Machine #3 finally boots into rom based ios (ver 10.0). A reload command brings it up from flash (ver 11.0). Will jumpers fix this or is it booting from rom because it had to reboot several times?

4) There are 3 (or is it 9?) batteries on the ENV board. Can I replace them, or connect a low voltage power supply to them such as a universal AC adapter made for portable consumer devices (I would pluf that into a ups), and will that solve my problem with failures/reboots when powering up? ======================================================== OK, I found that I have to configure the CCTL2 for the other boards in the ciscobus, that probably explains the boards that were not recognized.

The small board is an NVRAM or Flash memory board. I know the form factor is right for the CSC-MC NVRAM board and wrong for the CSC-MT which is a full MCI bus card, but I don't know about the CSC-M or the CSC-MC+ (see )

It would be odd for it to be a CSC-MC because the ENVM board holds the NVRAM for AGS+ systems.

Not sure about the second #3 but #1 and the first #3 look like software corruption of some kind.

The 6*ethernet card (CSC-MEC) is a cBus card and has to go in slots 5,

6, 8 or 9 with the CSC-CCTL2 board in slot 7. The MCI bus runs to all 9 slots, the cBus only the bottom 5. There are also two versions of the cBus and if you've got really old kit (unlikely with CSC/4s) you have to make sure that all the cards are compatible.

Flash, eh - that might well be a CSC-MC+ card then. We got rid of our AGS+s around 10.3 so I don't know when flash started to be supported or how to use it on that type of system. We always used to boot from ROM or by TFTP. What do the boot commands in the config say?

ISTR it being 3 and them looking like standard AA NiCds. I have no idea if they could be replaced or bypassed, but the point is that they're there to preserve the NVRAM contents while the power is off - using a UPS seems like overkill!

You have to install the CCTL2 and the other boards in the right slots but there's nothing else to configure on the CCTL2. (There are DIP switches to set a "unit number" but I can't remember what they're for and the manual I have (Hardware Products Installation Guide, October

1990) doesn't help, and anyway it only covers the CCTL not the CCTL2).

Sam