Something your Multias might do as they age is acquire something I have
decided to call "squiggly video disease". This is a state in which you
cannot read the text on the screen in SRM, and the Multia is basically
useless for graphics console work.

Lately I have been trying to get a bunch of diskless Multias together.
Of the 14 total units...

	8 are known working in diskless mode.
	3 have trouble coming up or staying up without traps/panics/etc.
	3 suffer from squiggly video disease.

What's interesting is that I am starting to spot a trend: the Multia's
with squiggly video disease all have old firmware (3.5-72 or thereabouts)
and _all_ three of them can run ARC just fine -- with rock solid video.

Nearly all of my working Multia's have the "latest" firmware, 3.8-3 ...
Only a couple have something older like 3.5-72, and I have to keep their
clock batteries in good shape so they won't insist on booting into ARC
all the time.

Is it reasonable to hypothesize that I might be able to resurrect the
three squiggly Multia's just by upgrading their firmware?

Please cc: me as I'm many weeks behind on my netbsd email, due to this
and other related projects sucking all of my time until July 4th.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com