[rescue] Fixing the NVRAM battery in the SS5

[Bryan Gurney]

On Fri, 06 Jan 2006 14:20:40 -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke  
<jp at celestrion.net> wrote:

> On Fri, 6 Jan 2006, Bryan Gurney wrote:
>
>> I haven't tried OpenBSD on it yet, mostly because you either need to
>> buy the CD or have the box hooked up to the Internet.
>
> It's not difficult to roll your own bootable ISO of OpenBSD.  I had a
> shellscript to do that, at one point, but somewhere along the line
> cdrecord's Sun-boot options changed, and I never got around to updating
> it because I buy the CDs, anyhow.
>
> But, as Sridhar pointed out, NetBSD on Sparc is very nice, too.
>

I might try NetBSD, since Sarge doesn't play nice with the serial console  
(and for a machine that is destined to run headless, that just won't do).   
Sarge seems to run a bit heavy, and defaults to installing things like  
exim4, etc. that I just don't need.  Sure, I could remove them, but then  
there's all the "Unimplemented Sparc system call X" messages on the  
console, and a few other things that are broken.  Time to experience  
another OS; I've gone through Winders, Mac System 7.5 through OS X 10.4,  
RedHat 6.2, Fedora, Debian Woody SPARC, Solaris 9 and 10.  I've tried and  
tried to set up OpenBSD on the SS5 but it always wedges at some point.

Back to the original reason for the post, I fired it up today, and saw  
this when Debian Sarge started up:

System Clock set. Local time: Mon Nov 21 17:50:51 EST 2005

I think that might have been the last time I powered on the machine, and I  
think I set the date as well.  My stopgap is to use ntpdate for now, but  
still, this thing may boot up with a MAC address of FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF or  
something, and refuse to continue.  (Or was that the SGI NVRAM failure  
mode?  I can't quite remember).