[johnnym]

Now I remember how the hell that stupid power switch works...it doesn't. Fortunately, the PS/2-to-Sun converter I have comes with a built-in power button for just such an occasion...! The Ultra 2 is more or less alive and well, although it's being a little crotchety - it's insistent on running the full POST suite before even giving me OpenBoot access over the serial port, to say nothing of displaying anything on the monitor. The POST halts with the message "OBIO Interrupt is in an incorrect state," whatever that means. It's not a dead battery, since it's bugging me for the firmware password when it finally does give me the OpenBoot prompt...

This thread mentions that you could be able to reset that firmware password by starting the machine without NVRAM, wait for the ok prompt, reinstall the NVRAM (carefully) and use set-defaults to finally clear the firmware password. I don't remember if I ever had to do that on one of my Sun machines, but starting w/o NVRAM is definitely possible.

For the full POST: maybe the environment is configured to run diagnostics all the time or after each cold start.

BTW, if that NVRAM still has juice in it, the machine must have been running a lot to not drain the NVRAM battery - or maybe the NVRAM got replaced some time in between.