On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 19:17, Vicky Staubly wrote:
> 
> I've got 2 SparcStation-2's... One, with 32MB of RAM and 400MB HD, with
> NetBSD 1.6, I'm using as DNS, NTP, and DHCP server; The other, with
> 64MB RAM and 4GB HD, and NetBSD 1.6.2, I'm using as my backup mail
> server. They're nice reliable machines, but I had to replace the NVRAM
> chips on them, and for some reason they won't boot-up automatically
> at power-up, I have to manually issue the "boot" command. I've checked
> that I don't have diag-switch? turned on. But now that I have them on
> UPS, it should be less of an issue.

Newer NVRAM chips seem to have a subtle difference which the Sun's don't
like. I tried to replace the NVRAM in my IPX with a new one and found it
always produced an error on power-up, but would then boot when told to
afterwards. I ended up getting a Lithium cell grafted onto the old chip
and it works properly as before.

I think the NVRAM FAQ recently started mentioning this fact too.

Matt