On Fri, 23 Jan 1998, Chris G. Demetriou wrote:
   
   >  There are three possible values for the
   > auto_action variable on all SRMs i can remember.  one's halt, one's
   > boot, and the last does what you (and I, usually 8-) want.
   
   The third one is "RESTART". Please post here if you ever figure
   out what exactly the behaviour of AUTO_ACTION is; it's not described
   terribly well in the architecture manual. In fact, I'm sure I used
   BOOT and a `halt' or `shutdown -h' under NetBSD still brought me
   to an SRM prompt, but I don't have time to test this right now.
   
On the EB164 and PC164, we always get the the system halt throwing us
to the chevron prompt (>>>) of SRM.  We never used RESTART, only HALT
while setting up, and BOOT when in service where we wanted the server
back up after a crash without human intervention.

Maybe now we can call Compaq customer service and ask, I understand
they're better about documentation than DEC was :)