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