Workaround for broken break command on Sun Netra x1

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Written By: Steve Ayotte

Date: 6/15/2008

The Problem

The Sun Netra x1's LOM seems to have trouble sending a break to the console when you enter the "break" command. This certainly doesn't seem to be the case all the time, but it's enough that Googling turned up a lot of hits for me. None of them offered useful workarounds, instead all the Usenet, mailing list and forum threads just died out. Maybe it's such a simple misconfiguration that when those posters found the cause they were too embarassed to update the thread with their findings. If so, I haven't found it, but the method below is working in the interim.

The Workaround

The workaround is to set the bootmode in the LOM to "forth" which prevents any of the hardware from being probed or the system attempting to boot, and leaves you at an "ok" prompt. From here you can set whatever nvram variables you need to. In my case, I wanted to boot off the network to reinstall the OS.

  lom> bootmode forth
  lom> poweroff
  lom> poweron
  
  (Some POST text goes by, then you get dropped to the OpenBoot prompt)
  ok setenv boot-device net
  ok power-off
  #.
  lom> bootmode normal
  lom> poweron

This much done, the system will now boot off the network. When I'm done I'll set the boot-device back to disk:a by the same method.

Other Ideas

I understand it's possible to change the key sequence for dropping to the OBP. This might work, but I haven't tried it. I'll update this page if/when I try it, for now this is doing the trick for me.