SGI Iris Indigo R3000

The first Silicon Graphics workstation I owned was an SGI Iris Indigo R3000 running IRIX 5.3.

Can't set tod clock

One of the problems I ran into with the Indigo was that one day when I turned on the workstation it reported:

Initializing tod clock.
   setting secs=0 min=0 hour=0 day=1 month=1 year=0
   Can't set tod clock.

This is caused by the on board battery being empty.

The battery in my Iris Indigo R3000 had part number TL-5186 - 3.6V 370 mAh - and was produced by Tadiran. The TL-5186 has been discontinued and was replaced by the TL-4986.

In my case the battery was not soldered onto the motherboard and removing the rubber band that keeps the battery in place was enough to pull out the battery. But before I could reach the battery I had to unscrew a piece of protective transparent plastic - see above photo.

SGI The Netherlands sent me a replacement battery for free (thanks!).

Indigo R3000 battery related

• Indigo R3K Battery Replacement - clear step-by-step instructions with photos.
• TL-4986 datasheet (pdf) - replaces the TL-5186.

Obtaining the Indigo R3000 serial number

The following one liner reports the serial number of an Iris Indigo R3000:

/usr/etc/netstat -ia | grep 08:00 | sed 's/ *//;s/://g' | head -1 | tr '[a-f]' '[A-F]'