[rescue] do i really need an NVRAM?

[Arthur Wouk]

i am resurrecting a sparc 2 (actually a sparc2 motherboard in a
sparc1+ pizza box). i got tired of the noise of the two boat anchors
(st1680N) which it came supplied with, and put in an ibm dors-31...
which is so much quieter, and runs so much cooler. and it has the
weitek power-up chip in it, so it is faster than stock.

i had been having date problems, which allowed me to conclude that the
NVRAM battery was dead: TOD oscillator not running was the message,
the ethernet  address was all fs, etc...

so after i pulled the boat anchors,  i booted from cdrom and installe
sol2.7, not without harassment from the installer along the way about
the nvram defects. eventually it allowed me to get a prompt, and i was
able to format the new hard drive (it came up with vad magic bnumber
of course, it is a compaq/ibm drive with compaq firmware), and then
reboot from cd rom (of course the first time it wouldn't load the hard
drive). this time it allowed me to install on the hard drive,
complaining about the nvram at appropriate points. the majow problem
was it would not boot from disk until i gave a boot /iomm... command
from the ok prompt. it complained about le0 not looping back, whcih
made sense there was no functioning ethernet address.

anyway, eventually it settled down. and, to my amazement, i found that
telnet and ftp and ping were all working, despite the complaints.
and of course i set date and time correctly during the boot.

so now, do i really need a new nvram? is there anything besides
annoying rebooting which will follow from the lack of a functioning
battery?