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un-ultra-5-10-nvram-no-longer-works.52997/  


New member here... mainly just joined to sell off my old Sun and other ancient computer equipment. But, as I was digging through old files, I found stuff that I thought might be useful to the folks here so I'm posting it in hopes this becomes an archive for such info.

As the old Sun systems get older, eventually the NVRAM dies. Of course, you could just replace the chip, solder on a connection to replaceable batteries, etc., but in the interim, here's a procedure you can follow that will set the datetime and hostid:

1. power on system
2. when you see "The IDPROM contents are invalid", hit Stop-A
3. enter the following commands at "ok" prompt:

ok set-defaults
ok 1 0 mkp
ok 80 1 mkp
ok 8 2 mkp
ok 0 3 mkp
ok 20 4 mkp
ok c0 5 mkp
ok ff 6 mkp
ok ee 7 mkp
ok 0 8 mkp
ok 0 9 mkp
ok 0 a mkp
ok 0 b mkp
ok c0 c mkp
ok ff d mkp
ok ee e mkp

#Compute and store checksum in location f
ok 0 f 0 do i idprom@ xor loop f mkp

4. now, enter ‘banner’ and you should see:

Ethernet address: 8:0:20:c0:ff:ee, Host ID: 80c0ffee.

The commands in step #3 above manually program the Ethernet and Host ID to the values you see in the line above. Normally, these things are saved in the NVRAM chip when the battery is working. Bare in mind, the address 8:0:20:c0:ff:ee is a mock up address which should work fine as long as you don’t use the same mock up address on another machine on the same network. You can change the value of the last 3 bytes to anything you wish as long as it doesn’t conflict with another Sun machine’s address.

5. now restart with:

ok reset

6. after the Solaris operating system boots up, login as ‘root’ and set the time with:

root# date 0502212911

This sets the date/time to May 2nd, 21:29 hours, 2011. The format is:

mmddHHMMYY

mm=2 digit month, dd=2 digit day of month, HH=hours, MM=minutes, YY=last 2 digits of year