You can't tell from the picture but she's a real tank - weighing close to 45 lbs I'd say. That's the uber cool thing about old Sun hardware - they built those bastards to last.

After opening it up and blowing it out with some compressed air I plugged it in, connected the serial port to my old Looonux box (all the output on a *real* computer will go out the serial port if no keyboard is attached) and turned it on. This is the 5th old Unix box I've bought off the eBay and it's always a "hold your breath" moment the first time you power them on. The power light comes on, the fans start blowing and she makes a few beeps then she starts spitting basic system info out the serial port. So far so good. She then announces that she's initializing the memory and PRESTO MAGICO she spits this out:

"Firmware password:"

She wants to know the firmware password???? That's odd, no? Very odd.

That is to say, how in the name of Allah would I know what the firmware password is? So off to google I go and it turns out you can set a password in the NVRAM (sort of like a BIOS in a PC) which is needed before you do anything with it. You can't boot it, you can't make any changes to the system, to wit - you can't do anything.

After much googling I come to the conclusion that there seems to be three possible ways to get around this.

The first one is to hold STOP-N while you turn the machine on (this stops the boot process) then hit STOP-A (this gets you an ok prompt) then type "setenv security-mode none", which turns off the password. I plugged my Sun keyobard in and tried this a few times but it doesn't seem to work on my box as it just keep asking me for a password.

Option number two is to buy a new NVRAM chip and replace the old one. Bah - I found some on eBay for 20 bucks so this is noted as an option if I can't work anything else out.

Option number three is to pull the NVRAM chip off the motherboard and boot the machine, this gets you a bunch of funky errors then an ok prompt which is what you need to turn off the password. Then - WHILE THE MACHINE IS RUNNING - plug the NVRAM chip back into the motherboard and save the new password free settings.

This option is fraught with peril, for a number of reasons, the first of which is that the NVRAM chip is located directly behind the power supply - right where the giant red X is:

So you have to pull the power supply out as far as it will go (while staying connected) then squeeze your nubby little fingers behind it, pull the chip, then turn the machine on, wait for the ok prompt, then, without touching the memory (the memory sticks are also beneath the power supply) or zapping anything for that matter, push the chip back into the board. Heh...

The red arrow is pointing to the NVRAM chip. You can see that it's a tight squeeze - and probably not a very smart thing to attempt. But I'm not the smartest bloke on the planet so what the hell. The real bitch of it was the chip was a royal pain to push back into its seat. It was a real tight squeeze and you can't see what you're doing because the memory sticks (now that I think about it I should have removed the memory- doh) block the view on one side and the cables connected to the power supply block the view from the top. So you're left blindly trying to very carefully slide this chip around and push it (you had to push pretty hard too) back home.

But alas! Victory is mine!! I got the bastard back in (after about 5 minutes of working on it) and reset the password, turned the power off then back on and I was in!!

Now I'm pretty much all set, I just need the CD and hard drive I should be able to install Solaris and be playing nethack poste haste!