I got this machine through Marktplaats, a Dutch consumer auction and secondhand items site. Many thanks to Nico for the careful packaging and the inclusion of everything needed!
The machine is a beautiful rugged “lugtop” from around 1990.
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The machine was originally a Network General Sniffer. These were immensely expensive machines at the time, containing different kinds of hardware to allow “sniffing” on different communication networks. Mine came with a 3com FDDI card (3c996-SX), a 3com 1GB ethernet card (3c996-T) and a WAN card (a Network General L2000).
The machine came with two keyboards. The one attached to the machine was damaged; the left control key was missing a cap, and the switch under it was broken. The second keyboard was fine but had a connector that was too wide; it would not fit inside the Dolch. This was easily fixed by cutting it off and replacing it with a new RJ9 P4C4 connector.
The machine would not boot; its CMOS battery was dead so it could not retain any settings.
Links:
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Bios | Award bios version V4.51PG |
Processor | Pentium 1 (P54) |
Motherboard | AI5TV |
Fixing the battery
This machine came with a dead battery, and it causes boot failures.
The battery is embedded in a “chip” like thing that contains a real-time clock, memory and the battery, all helpfully enclosed in an epoxy layer - so the battery cannot be replaced. The type of the thing is Odin oec12c887a. A replacement for this, the Dallas ds12C887A is still available but sourcing a new one is hard.
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I attempted to repair the module by adding an external battery as found out by other courageous people. Links:
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And with that the machine can boot again and could remember its settings 
Storage
The machine was altered, it came with 2 harddisks and a CD reader. The extra harddisk was lodged between the CD drive and the other drive and not fixed with screws. One disk seems to contain contains Windows 2000, the other Windows 98. Both disks have problems and give errors, but you can get the OSes to boot, sometimes partially. The Windows 2000 disk contains the Sniffer software.
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Both harddisks were unreliable: after fixing the battery the machine would randombly randomly boot from one or the other depending on whether the disk came “alive” at powerup. The boot itself would fail often because of disk errors. Next step is to recover the disk contents, if at all possible…
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