Re: NetBSD support for Suns with dead IDPROM batteries

[der Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

[paragraph-length lines repaired manually]

> [...] sanity check the MAC address of Suns at boot time to make sure
> they're not broadcast/multicast (or all zeros),

I dunno; I think forbidding non-broadcast multicast addresses would be
preventing stupid things at the price of preventing clever things.

> and if they are, assign something somewhat more sensible (e.g.
> 8:0:20: + the last 24 bits of time_t from the root filesystem [...])

Hijacking Sun's vendor prefix is not my idea of sensible.

If you really want to do something of the sort, I'd strongly
recommending using locally-administered addresses (bit 0x02 of the
first octet set), at least by default; this strikes me as exactly the
kind of thing they're for.

> For those systems that have disks in the default boot configuration
> (e.g. appropriate internal SCSI bus id), this small change will
> extend the life of such hardware ... until something else fails.

No more than just adding a battery to the clock chip will.  I wouldn't
call it "trivial", but it's certainly not all that hard for anyone who
knows which end of soldering iron to hold - which, I suspect, includes
almost everyone still trying to use Suns that old.

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