[johnnym]

Sorry, I'm a little lost now in figuring out what your current configuration is (NVRAM in/out, keyboard connected/disconnected, etc.) and it is important to know what was tested and what was not, to work systematically. E.g. the OpenBoot 3.x Command Reference manual ([1]) says on page 30:

Caution –
It is important to remember your security password and to set the
security password before setting the security mode. If you forget this password, you
cannot use your system; you must call your vendor ’s customer support service to
make your machine bootable again.

...which I interpret as follows: (1) Either there is always a default password configured in addition to the password set by a user that the Sun customer service knows - this would be bad for our undertaking to make your Ultra2 accessible again, because we also don't know this default password - or (2) there's a specific procedure we need to follow to reset the password. I mean if the manual I linked in an earlier post says a specific key combination held at startup resets the NVRAM vars to their defaults, why should this not work to also reset the password?

[1]: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/806...377-10.pdf

Yeah, serial-port comms are what it's defaulting to.

That's interesting. Assuming you needed to connect the keyboard to power on the Ultra2, I wonder why it is using the serial port as console. I thought it would switch to the glass console when a keyboard is connected, except maybe if input-device/output-device are pointing to the serial port (ttya usually).

When I had the NVRAM in, it ran through some amount of POSTing and then got to the point where it prompted for the password; now, it reports that it's starting the POST and then never prints anything more (I've left it running for over an hour.)

That is with the NVRAM out, and Keyboard in, right?

What about:

Does Stop + N work to reset the NVRAM settings when the NVRAM is inserted? The manual says you have to hold these keys until the banner appears.

...then. Sorry, with "NVRAM is inserted" I didn't meant to insert it during operation but that the machine starts up with inserted NVRAM.