On Sat, 8 Dec 2001, Chris Lloyd wrote:

   > It could be your floppy, it could be the floppy drive, it could be the RAM
   > again :)
   >
   >  - Chris

   Funny you mention this, one of the machines has a bad floppy and a bad
   video card, but more memory. I finally decided to consolidate the machines
   and I have 1 gig of hard drive, 28 megs of memory, a decent video card,
   and a busted NVRAM... But I got 1.5.2 installed just fine now so I think I
   was having some kind of hardware trouble before with sysinst.

   Looks like there's a way to hardcode the mac address so I can get the
   thing up on the network. What a pain! Any suggestions as how to fix the
   NVRAM causing the mac address to go to ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff other than
   hardcoding it and rebuilding the kernel?

   Andy

   acruhl@sdf.lonestar.org
   SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org



The NVRAM can be reprogrammed from the PROM, the Sun HW FAQ will tell you
how.  I have done this to an IPC and a 3/80 with success.  What is "hard"
is recovering the MAC address itself, if you don't know it.  Although,
this is not a critical problem.  The contents will likely be lost, again,
when the AC power goes away, but it may survive short off/on cycles, if
needed.

New NVRAM chips can be purchased from Mouser Electronics.  I did this,
later, to the IPC and 3/80 with great success.  The FAQ will tell you how
to reprogram them, once replaced.




Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org
http://anduin.eldar.org  - & -  http://anduin.ipv6.eldar.org [IPv6 only]
[finger brad@anduin.eldar.org for PGP public key]