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Setting/resetting a MAC address on a Sun workstation with dead NVRAM battery using OBP (Open Boot PROM)

I had this post in draft since 2019 when I picked up a Sun Ultra 60 from ebay and needed to reset it’s MAC address because the NVAM battery had died. I never posted it apparently, probably because I only had to do it once and then forgot about it.

I had to give up the Ultra 60 when we moved from the US back to the UK – if you’ve every come across one of these you’ll know how heavy they are and I couldn’t justify the shipping costs (besides, I already had a Power Mac G5 and a Mac Pro 3,1 going in the container, which were heavy enough).

I saw a FB post recently that someone had a palette of Sun Ultra 5 ‘s for £50, so after working out some shipping, I now have an Ultra 5.

I previously followed instructions I bookmarked here but looks like that article is not up anymore, but it is archived on Wayback Machine here.

The relevant part I needed were the steps at the Open Boot Prompt to reset the MAC and System address:

01 0 mkp
80 1 mkp  < = System type.  For sun4u arch 80.  For sun4m arch - 72
08 2 mkp  <= Sun AUI is is always 08:00:20, which are the next three values for MAC
0  3 mkp
20 4 mkp
01 5 mkp <= 01:02:03 next values to append for your MAC, e.g. to generate 08:00:20:01:02:03 as MAC
02 6 mkp
03 7 mkp
0 8 mkp
0 9 mkp
0 a mkp
0 b mkp
c0 c mkp <= next 2 values are your System ID, e.g. c0:ff:ee
ff d mkp
ee e mkp
0 f 0 do i idprom@ xor loop f mkp  <= Calculates the checksum

The Gentoo wiki also has a great reference for OBP prompt commands here.

Notes on setting the MAC address also here and here.

I don’t have VGA monitor for the Ultra 5 yet, or a Sun keyboard or mouse, so I’m booting via a serial terminal right now (using my VT132) – first two steps scrolled off the screen:

After the above steps, reset-all, then your boot command depending where you are booting from,

boot disk

or 

boot net
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Mounting SMB and NFS shares from ugreen NAS on Linux

To mount an NFS share on Ubuntu:

sudo mount -t nfs4 ip-address=of-nas:/volume[x]/sharename /mnt/path

If you get this error:

mount: /mnt/path: bad option; for several filesystems (e.g. nfs, cifs) you might need a /sbin/mount.<type> helper program

Install helpers (from here):

# for NFS
sudo apt install nfs-common

# for SMB
sudo apt install cifs-utils

For mounting an SMB share using a specific userid (will be prompted for password):

sudo mount -t cifs -o username=your-user-id //ip-address/sharename /mnt/path

Note for ugreen NAS shares, the sharename is just the sharename and not /volume[]x]/sharename

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Creating and renewing Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates with certbot

After purchasing SSL certs for many years for my personal project websites, I recently switched to creating free Let’s Encrypt certs using CertBot instead.

To install with python and pip on Debian based Linux, for nginx (from here):

Install deps and install:

sudo apt install python3 python3-dev python3-venv libaugeas-dev gcc
sudo python3 -m venv /opt/certbot/
sudo /opt/certbot/bin/pip install --upgrade pip

sudo /opt/certbot/bin/pip install certbot certbot-nginx
sudo ln -s /opt/certbot/bin/certbot /usr/local/bin/certbot

To generate certificate and renew manually (same command):

sudo certbot certonly -v --reinstall --webroot --webroot-path=/var/www/html/ --email your@email --agree-tos --no-eff-email -d your.domain.name

To view current status of your certificates:

certbot certificates

For websites not on the public internet where the validation step can’t use the webserver to host a validation file, certbot also can validate using a DNS record with a generated value – follow the prompts to use this approach:

certbot certonly --manual --preferred-challenges dns -d your.domain.name
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