[ from the solder-fumes-are-nice dept. ]
After a bit of hassle, I managed to repair a couple of IPC NVRAMs with Hussein. So his IPC is now working correctly, whereas mine appears to be dead. It’s not worth any more hassle so I will be getting another one either through ebay or a friend. I am tracking some SPARCstations at the moment anyway, because they’re cheap.
Hopefully I can upload some pictures of the NVRAM mod performed on both chips – but the gist is that they now have 2xAA battery holders soldered on via a removable clip so as to make the setup similar in concept to that on old PCs with AA battery backed BIOS data. MACs containing “dead” and “f00f” are not terribly interesting you might say – nor is a hostid of “c0ffee”…but it’s still fun. 
Jon.