I had a Sun box attached to a switch I had not control over and I needed to jumpstart it. Unfortunately, I was getting nowhere. After crosschecking everything in my setup the only thing I did not try was to force speed and duplex on the Sun box to see if it would start booting.

I wondered if it would be possible to do so in Open Boot prompt. So I fired up the most logical man page in the given situation - the boot man page. Sure enough it is possible to force speed and duplex from ok prompt:

{1} ok boot net:speed=100,duplex=full - install

And off it went happily booting…