Restoring a Sun SPARCstation IPX part 1: PSU and NVRAM (2020)
rs-online.com
rs-online.com
Nobody has the root password anymore, but fortunately, it's vulnerable to at least seven remote root sunrpc exploits. We "log in" by running a Python script that pops a root shell.
No, I am not kidding.
Edit: Checked out records: purchased and brought online in 1993.
Edit 2: In response to "why don't you just change the password?". When I asked, I was told they "can't" because they'd "lose access to the database". I didn't ask them to elaborate, because it would have opened a whole new can of horror worms, but I removed it from the Internet (it's on a non-routable, weakly "air gapped" network now).
I'm surprised that when you do this, you can't then set the root password. (Also, holy cow. What a durable machine.)
This. There was also a story and a video, about 10 years ago (?), of a Commodore 64 still used at a car shop in Poland to compute stuff related to tires/wheels settings (degrees/angles, something like that). The C64 had basically been used every day the shop was opened for 30 years. It could still be in use. Or maybe it got retired because the owner of the shop retired (and hence, in a way, outlived the mechanic).
The answer I got: "we can't. We'll lose access to the database". I did not ask for elaboration, but it is not routable to/from the Internet.
In any case, as long as it’s not directly routable to the internet and there’s a plan to phase it out, probably nothing to get worked up about.
I hope the sound of the drive isn’t particularly bothersome. It’s rather impressive to still be working.
altroot:x:0:0:Alternative Root User:/:/bin/sh
We used to do this all the time for users who needed root access to their own workstation. It allowed us to avoid telling them the common root password used on all the machines in the organization.
In your case, doing this might be beneficial in case there is a network problem because you'll have a way to log in as root locally.
It does have me thinking about what versions of SSH would run on such an old OS. I'm sure there were versions available at one time... and since it's vulnerable to remote exploit anyways the version wouldn't really matter.
It makes for a pretty good project box as one of the smaller SPARC machines. Lots of documentation from hobbyists, Sun's own service manuals, and OpenBSD/NetBSD. Flash SCSI disk replacements are much easier to get your hands on now (I used a ZuluSCSI).
I've kept a log with photos: https://drislock.org/pkb/machines/perfect.html#a-little-lunc...
It seems to have been part of IBM's IBM-IPT Tester system. Hostnames were interesting: flower, owl, piglet, diamond, hotlips. I didn't get any interesting data though since this system relied on network resources.
That era hardware (although I ended up with a fair bit of experience on the whole Sun 3/4 lines)... I had just gotten out of the Army, didn't know what I was going to be when I grew up, and the future was so terrifying but bright.
It's a good thing that I don't horde (except cars, that's a problem), because I'd have racks of these things. Named after Star Trek characters, not because I care about it, but because that was the naming convention at one of my first "real jobs".
IDK, maybe nobody else thinks this way, but I'm really glad to see someone fixing one.
The type 5 was a better mouse (with ball though) but as I remember the keyboard was a little worse.
Most of that is misguided. The IPX was the high volume, low cost, face-for-the-user Solaris box during exactly the moment in the mid 90's where Intel and Microsoft took over and Sun and the Unix vendors lost the plot.
People remember it as a ridiculous $15k joke that was half the speed of the Pentium 100 you ordered out of the back of Computer Shopper.
But when the IPC and IPX were released, SPARC was still ascendant (Intel's flagship was the 486/33!), "PCs" were still running Windows 3.1 (or just DOS), Linux didn't exist yet, and they were the best computers you could get. Well unless you were a graphic nerd and tilted to SGI instead.
I very specifically remember salivating over these boxes, which were legitimate upgrades over the SPARCstation 1/1+/2 machines which were groundbreaking in the late 80's.
Maybe that gave the form factor a bad name because all their good stuff was in pizza boxes.
At one point decades ago there were a lot of these IPXs and their SCSI accessories on eBay and they were a decent source of project boxes because you could use the power supply and stick your project where the hard drive was supposed to be, with the wires coming out the SCSI port. It looks like the model 411 is still $30 or so on eBay but there are few.
Because the Indy (and O2) are actually attainable. Indigo2, Octane2, Tezro cost 2-3x minimum. Sometimes a Personal IRIS comes up for relatively cheap though.
We were rolling out labs of Windows machines. Except for the lack of terminal, they were better on every single axis for the common university lab use cases - mostly netscape/mosaic and applications..
I also managed NeXT slabs and cubes; they were vastly better than the sun boxes because we had installed HDDs in the cubes and extra memory. The only problem with them was the absolutely terrible, shit behavior when users accidentally browsed the AFS root...
The only positive thing I can say about those Sun boxes is that _one_ behavior was better than NeXT. With NeXT, students would pull the power on them after wating four or five minutes of the beachball due to AFS I/O.
Serious GUI software will be written in QT5/6 where the jump wasn't as bad as qt4->5. Portability matters and now even more. Software will run in any OS and several times faster than Electron.
I love the industrial design of these pizza boxes, though. I didn't mind when I was running them headless as IRC servers or web hosts.
But yeah, complete white elephants at that point. Too little too late.
No comparison at all. Just every single interactive aspect of them was worse in every possible way and that includes I/O performance. At the time, in that era, people would babble about how much faster SCSI was, but the disks sitting in PCs were blazing fast in practice despite being attached by glorified joystick ports.
Motif was hell to develop for though.
I have got a Sun Type 5 keyboard though. I brought it to a mechanical keyboard meetup once, only to show it off because it is so pretty. Not the best key feel though, but I've got nothing to use it with.
Thanks for posting this one. good find.