> Sun NVRAM will eventually die.  [...] Long periods of storage seem to
> shorten battery life.

Well, long periods of being powered down will, unless you stop the
clock first.  If it's powered up, the clock is running off Vcc power
and the battery is basically out of the loop - but when it's powered
down, the clock oscillator and divider chains are sucking juice from
the battery.  If you stop the clock, there is no switching going on and
thus no current draw; battery drain is then supposedly reduced to the
point where battery life is approximately shelf life (ie, the major
drain is battery-internal leakage).

Whenever I take a machine out of service, even if I expect it to be for
only a day or two, I'm always careful to stop the clock first.

> Considering the chip is <$20 and takes 2 minutes to replace, it's not
> a big deal.

Or if you find it outrageous to pay even $15 for a new clock chip, you
can always take a small round file to the end of the chip, expose the
battery contacts, solder on a new battery, and all you'll need to do is
to reload the NVRAM contents.

I've occasionally wished I had a prefix I could allocate MAC addresses
out of for such machines.  But it's not clear the IEEE is willing to
allocate 24-bit prefixes, or even the 36-bit prefixes which are what
"individual address blocks" appear to be, to non-corporate entities; I
sent them email asking, but they never even bothered to respond, much
less answer.  And in any case, I'm not at all sure it'd be worth even
USD$550 to me....

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