From Newsgroup: comp.unix.solaris

We had this ancient SunFire V440 that had been quietly running an internal license daemon since the Bush administration. Nobody dared touch it. It wasnrCOt in the inventory, wasnrCOt in monitoring, and nobody had a password we were sure still worked. It just sat there in the corner, fans humming like a Zen monk, serving licenses and judgment in equal measure.

Then one day, Facilities decided to move racks for rCLairflow optimization.rCY They pulled the plug without asking anyone. When I saw it offline, my blood went cold. That box had an uptime older than some of the new hires.

We plugged it back in, hit power, and the console lit up with hieroglyphs rCo firmware banner from 2004, date in another century. The POST took five
minutes, then it stopped dead with a cheerful message:

WARNING: NVRAM checksum invalid. Restoring factory defaults.

At that moment, I knew this was going to be a s|-ance, not a reboot. The
boot PROM had lost all its environment variables rCo no boot-device, no diag-switch, nothing. It just sat there, blinking at me, waiting for a
manual boot command like it was 1999.

We had to hunt down an old Solaris 9 CD and use an external USB CD-ROM rCo which, of course, didnrCOt work without a firmware update. ThatrCOs how I ended up flashing a system older than my laptop battery just to make it see a
drive.

Eventually, it booted. License server came back like nothing happened. I didnrCOt cheer. I just stared at it, then whispered, rCLDonrCOt you ever do that
again.rCY

Management said, rCLMake sure this never happens again.rCY
I said, rCLSure. Step one: DonrCOt move racks with archaeology still in them.rCY
--
Tom Mix
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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.solaris

Tom Mix wrote:

We had this ancient SunFire V440 that had been quietly running an internal license daemon since the Bush administration.

Did you take a hammer to it?
--
He's got a Hologram!
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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.solaris

Am 26.10.2025 00:55 Uhr schrieb Tom Mix:

Management said, rCLMake sure this never happens again.rCY
I said, rCLSure. Step one: DonrCOt move racks with archaeology still in them.rCY

And that's why running machines that are unknown to the employees is a
rather bad idea.
Ancient machines will fail at some point.
Is there someone who knows what is running on them and how to set that
up again on another machine?
No?
Than you might have a really bad day in a situation where you never
like such an outage.
Do you have spare parts?
Do you have all the installation media and backups of it?
TLDR: I like to run old stuff for fun, but I would never run such a
machine in a mission-critical environment, as the risk of a long-term
outage is too high.
--
Gru|f
Marco
Spam und Werbung bitte an
1761432939ichwillgesperrtwerden@nirvana.admins.ws
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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.solaris

On 2025-10-26, Marco Moock <mm+solani@dorfdsl.de> wrote:

Am 26.10.2025 00:55 Uhr schrieb Tom Mix:

Management said, rCLMake sure this never happens again.rCY
I said, rCLSure. Step one: DonrCOt move racks with archaeology still in
them.rCY

And that's why running machines that are unknown to the employees is a
rather bad idea.

Ancient machines will fail at some point.
Is there someone who knows what is running on them and how to set that
up again on another machine?

No?
Than you might have a really bad day in a situation where you never
like such an outage.

Do you have spare parts?
Do you have all the installation media and backups of it?

TLDR: I like to run old stuff for fun, but I would never run such a
machine in a mission-critical environment, as the risk of a long-term
outage is too high.

Relax, this was just a story from 8-10 years ago. All is good
--
Tom Mix
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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.solaris

Tom Mix <tommix@dev.null> writes:

WARNING: NVRAM checksum invalid. Restoring factory defaults.

[...]

We had to hunt down an old Solaris 9 CD and use an external USB CD-ROM U\ which, of course, didnUft work without a firmware update. ThatUfs how I ended up flashing a system older than my laptop battery just to make it see a drive.

Short-term: document that recovery procedure.

Medium-term: It's sometimes possible (not easy, possible) to replace the
EEPROM battery, or to hook up another battery to the right pins on the
EEPROM chip.

Eventually, it booted. License server came back like nothing happened. I didnUft cheer. I just stared at it, then whispered, UgDonUft you ever do that again.Uh

Management said, UgMake sure this never happens again.Uh
I said, UgSure. Step one: DonUft move racks with archaeology still in them.Uh

Medium-term: disks and fans die. If it has RAID or mirrored disks, at
least the disk failures aren't fatal.

For the longer term: make a complete disk copy, as in
dd if=Sun-disk(s) of=whatever, and then look into virtual machines,
qemu, and the like.

Just a suggestion,
-WBE
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From Newsgroup: comp.unix.solaris

Tom Mix <tommix@dev.null> writes:

Relax, this was just a story from 8-10 years ago. All is good

It would have been helpful to say something to that effect in the
original article.
-WBE
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