[rescue] SPARCEngine AXi NVRAM problem

[John Ruschmeyer]

On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 10:43 AM, John Ruschmeyer <jruschme at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 9:33 AM, Steve Hatle <shatle at nfldinet.com> wrote:
>
>> On 11/20/10 7:28 AM, "John Ruschmeyer" <jruschme at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > As I may have mentioned, I am trying to set up a SPARCEngine AXi board
>> which
>> > has been sitting in my project pile for some time.
>>
>> >
>> > Help! Has anybody seen a problem like this before? Any suggestions as to
>> > what to try or how to fix it?
>>
>> I'm not in a spot to be able to dig for the answer, but I seem to recall
>> from that era that there is a step at the end to recalculate the checksum
>> on
>> the NVRAM.
>>
>> Of course, I could be wrong- it's happened before :-)
>>
>
>  No, you are right and I did that too.
>
> I was starting to wonder about the machine type byte (second byte of the
> IDPROM). It's currently set to 80 which seems to be something of a catchall
> value. I'm wondering if it is wrong. Unfortunately the NVRAM FAQ appears to
> not have been updated for quite some time.
>

Okay, now I'm totally confused...

As I said, the IDPROM seems to be set correctly to a valid mac id, hostid,
and checksum. On a whim, I did an 'arp -a', though, and discovered that the
ethernet device seems to believe that its mac id is all zeroes.

I can understand the zeroes if the battery were dead, but why am I seeing a
valid value in the IDPROM and banner?

John