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OF tinkering is safe.
Authored by: Anonymous on Jan 31, '02 08:01:17PM

Adding new variables to OpenFirmware has little risk of damaging your computer. This is a feature, and not a hack of OpenFirmware. The real risk comes when cluebies start modifying existing values.

I use custom OpenFirmware values for my contact information, and asset tag #'s. Hardly anyone, but perhaps staunch geeks would know to check here, and OF variables survive reinstalls/etc.

'man nvram' for more information...

also, check out here:

http://bananajr6000.apple.com/OF/technotes.html

Now I just need to port/code the two utilities you need to display custom bootup logos via OpenFirmware. Solaris has them: iconedit, and uhhh, I forget the other one.

To set arbitrary variables:
- Go into the OpenFirmware prompt (if you don't now how to do this, stop here)
- Type nvram -p, and make sure the variable names you want to create don't already exist.
- If they don't already exist, you can create variables using the following format:
<pre>
% sudo nvram variablename="text you want here"
</pre>

For example, I have the following variables set in my OF:
<pre>
% sudo nvram my-owner="John Doe"
% sudo nvram my-phone="555-555-1212"
% sudo nvram my-assetnum="BC45312"
</pre>

This is cool, because you can set organizational information in a hard-to-destroy way that survives hard disk crashes, etc. It also allows you to pull organizational information via scripts or other remote tools, using the nvram command as so:

nvram variablename
<pre>
% nvram my-owner
my-owner John Doe
</pre>



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