I've always liked these little pizza box machines and have wanted one for a very long time. These days they can be found quite inexpensively, many sellers on auction sites don't have the adapters needed to test them properly and list them as "parts only" even though there is nothing wrong with them (other than the NVRAM, which we'll get to). The machine pictured above was listed as not working but other than the NVRAM had no issues whatsoever.
As expected this machine booted to an error stating that "the IDPROM contents are invalid". I soldered a battery in but I don't like how far it sticks up since it blocks the SBus slot in the center of the board. I don't have any cards to put there so the clearance issue isn't a problem for the moment.
The commands to restore the NVRAM contents once the battery has been repaired are rather arcane but reasonably well documented. For my machine I needed to input the following commands:
set-defaults
setenv diag-switch? false
1 0 mkp
80 1 mkp
8 2 mkp
0 3 mkp
20 4 mkp
4f 5 mkp
92 6 mkp
ea 7 mkp
0 8 mkp
0 9 mkp
0 a mkp
0 b mkp
4f c mkp
92 d mkp
ea e mkp
0 f 0 do i idprom@ xor loop f mkp
reset
I ended up using a script to generate the MAC id based on the NVRAM barcode sticker. I don't believe this is strictly necessary but now I know the MAC is definitely unique.
My machine came with two fully operational (!) SCSI hard drives which were replaced with a ZuluSCSI device, both because the drives are super loud and for convenience. I created two blank 1 GB drives with dd and copied the Debian Etch installer to the SD card as CD2.iso
ok probe-scsi-all
/iommu@0,10000000/sbus@0,10001000/dma@1,81000/esp@1,80000
/iommu@0,10000000/sbus@0,10001000/espdma@5,8400000/esp@5,8800000
Target 0
Unit 0 Disk ZULUSCSIHARDDRIVE 2.0
Target 1
Unit 0 Disk ZULUSCSIHARDDRIVE 2.0
Target 2
Unit 0 Removable Read Only device ZULUSCSICDROM 2.0
Target 6
Unit 0 Removable Read Only device TOSHIBA XM-4101TASUNSLCD108404/18/94
Debian is what I would have installed on this machine back before they were considered "vintage" so I started with Debian Etch since that was the last release that still had support for 32-bit SPARC systems. The installer booted to this corrupted monochrome console which was a pain to get through. I also tried installing via the serial console and while that gave color output, the installer hung after the first prompt. Other than the display issues installation was relatively straightforward.
WIP. Presently doesn't initialize video on boot
Image the drives and copy them to the ZuluSCSI for further experimentation. They appeared to contain a fully working SunOS 5.4 system but I haven't yet looked at the drive contents in detail.