Restoring a Sun SPARCstation IPX part 1: PSU and NVRAM (2020)

Posted by ibobev 1 day ago

Comments

Comment by codejake 1 day ago

We still have a SPARC IPX in production, hosting an antiquated database. The hard drive sounds like grinding metal. I've been trying to get rid of it for years. I succeeded once, but it was brought back from the dead. This thing has been running with the original parts since 1993 to 2026, minus ~1 year of downtime.

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).

Comment by shrubble 1 day ago

QEMU has a SPARC CPU emulator; it might be possible to run the operating system and database in a VM on regular x86-64 hardware.

Comment by greatquux 1 day ago

You absolutely can run 32bit Solaris in qemu SPARC emulation. 64bit is not there yet unfortunately. But definitely dd this and get it virtualized!

Comment by EvanAnderson 1 day ago

A BlueSCSI[0] might be an interesting thing to add if you want to alleviate the hard disk sound.

[0] https://bluescsi.com/

Comment by ThrowawayR2 1 day ago

Out of morbid curiosity, is there a recovery plan for when it inevitably experiences a hardware failure?

Comment by jamesfinlayson 1 day ago

I've been at two places with ancient physical hardware - in both cases there were people that just kept an eye on ebay and presumably payed whatever the asking price was for spare parts.

Comment by jeffrallen 1 day ago

Buy parts from RS and fix it, silly.

Comment by linksnapzz 1 day ago

This box needs an official retirement ceremony when the database is migrated.

Comment by gknoy 1 day ago

> We "log in" by running a Python script that pops a root shell.

I'm surprised that when you do this, you can't then set the root password. (Also, holy cow. What a durable machine.)

Comment by TacticalCoder 1 day ago

> (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).

Comment by jdboyd 1 day ago

If you get a root shell once, why not change the root password then?

Comment by codejake 1 day ago

Great, obvious question!

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.

Comment by adrianmonk 1 day ago

You can just add a second line to /etc/passwd with a different username but the same numerical uid. Like this:

    altroot:x:0:0:Alternative Root User:/:/bin/sh

Then, of course, run (as root) "passwd altroot" to set a password.

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.

Comment by bink 1 day ago

Back in the day we would've just added our IP to the .rhosts file and no password would be required at all!

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.

Comment by shrubble 1 day ago

SSH v1 protocol would work; but it’s still considered insecure by SSH clients of the last two decades :-)

Comment by orthogonal_cube 1 day ago

Seems as though the process of changing the password on their end may not be as straightforward. Or they’re just worried that misconfiguring it may prevent them from getting connected again.

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.

Comment by numpad0 1 day ago

dump that disk asap!!!!!

Comment by epakai 1 day ago

I got a IPX in 2022 and restored it. I was a bit lucky and mine was an ex-IBM unit that came with the Weitek SPARC POWER μP processor (80 MHz) upgrade.

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.

Comment by bradleyy 1 day ago

Everybody hating on the IPX, but I have so much nostalgia. Yes, my friends who ran a repair shop kept employed fixing them, like transmission shops survive on minivan transmissions.

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.

Comment by pureagave 1 day ago

I had one on my desk and eventually a collection of Sparc 2, 10's and a V in my garage. I miss the keyboard and Sun OS 4, the Trinitron display and working on difficult engineering problems on those machines.

Comment by cesaref 1 day ago

Nobody misses the terrible optical mouse with the blue metal mouse mat though! You are right, the keyboards were great.

Comment by smackeyacky 1 day ago

I do. At my first job it looked so technical! Sure they were a bit rubbish but at least you didn’t have to pick all the hair and gank off the rollers and balls all the time.

Comment by wolvoleo 1 day ago

Oh yes I remember that one. Wasn't it the type 4?

The type 5 was a better mouse (with ball though) but as I remember the keyboard was a little worse.

Comment by ajross 1 day ago

> Everybody hating on the IPX

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.

Comment by wolvoleo 1 day ago

I remember the java station 1 as well which was running byte code natively in an IPX-like box. That thing really was so horrendously slow out was basically a paperweight. I had the chance to play with one when it was just new but it was like a joke or something.

Maybe that gave the form factor a bad name because all their good stuff was in pizza boxes.

Comment by jasoneckert 1 day ago

God that machine was terrible - underpowered and undercooled, which led to frequent overheating and component failures. When I first started at Sun, they put one of those on my desk as a joke on my first day (it was quickly replaced so that I could get some real work done).

Comment by mzi 1 day ago

At work in the 90s we gave tons of old Sparcstation 10s away. They rapidly replaced all IPX and IPS at the computer clubs around Sweden. One Volvo was destined for Luleå and was really weighted down with a trunk full of pizza boxes.

Comment by foobiekr 1 day ago

I managed a lab of them. I _hated them_. They were unreliable, slow, and just absolutely miserable because they created endless complaints.

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.

Comment by jeffbee 1 day ago

A younger person who only knows the comparative merits of Windows, macOS, and Linux in this decade probably cannot imagine the relief felt by people when they were finally able to move their technical applications off unix boxes onto Windows NT workstations. The situation was so bad, the computers cost so much and worked so poorly, a Dell with a Pentium Pro was like a miracle, at the time.

Comment by shrubble 1 day ago

Only some people who were around at that time welcomed Windows NT; others decried the various failings of Microsoft…

Comment by wolvoleo 1 day ago

I always really enjoyed hp-ux with VUE in the early 90s. It was way ahead of windows (especially before 95 was out!) and fast.

Motif was hell to develop for though.

Comment by chihuahua 1 day ago

I don't have any nostalgia for old machines, I understand the 5- or 6-figure price tags were ridiculous, but I'm curious - in what way did Unix machines back then work poorly?

Comment by qingcharles 1 day ago

For the price, these Sun workstations were slow as hell to me. X was horribly laggy. The UI put me off Unix GUIs for a decade. The mouse was meh.

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.

Comment by foobiekr 1 day ago

There is an irony that Wine is the most stable linux ABI for GUI applications in 2026.

Comment by anthk 1 day ago

That means nothing when everything it's either RHEL bound, Ubuntu LTS or docker containers among standalone services written in Go which are everywhere.

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.

Comment by sixothree 1 day ago

I remember a lab with diskless systems where your disk quota was smaller than the kernel panic dump. So basically if you crashed a machine your account was instantly filled up and basically nothing would work. I believe it affected mail as well. Fun times.

Comment by jjgreen 1 day ago

But, but ... that cat

https://anachrocomputer.github.io/ipxcat1m.jpg

Comment by seanhunter 1 day ago

Totally terrible. ONe place I worked we all had sparcs and the first thing that happened whenever anyone left is there would be this mad shuffle where everyone nicked everyone else's computer with the IPX being the prize for whoever wasn't there at the time or the new joiner. So I had the IPX for a while, even just using it as an x client for a remote build server it was horrible.

Comment by MengerSponge 1 day ago

Classic day 1 hazing, the Wimp Lo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d696t3yALAY

Comment by jeffbee 1 day ago

Yeah it was a real piece of junk, but I guess there's no accounting for nostalgia. People also like to restore the SGI Indy, easily the worst machine that SGI ever shipped.

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.

Comment by JSR_FDED 1 day ago

The Indy was awesome. One client had 400 of them, as long as you didn’t take the lowest RAM entry level model they were excellent. Hardware was reliable, graphical desktop better than MacOS today, and very low support burden.

Comment by justin66 1 day ago

So true. Keep in mind, OP said it was the worst machine SGI shipped, not the worst machine Sun shipped. SGI's worst machine could be fixed by adding some RAM. Sun's worst machines were completely unsalvageable.

Comment by Keyframe 1 day ago

Hey, don't trash talk Indy like that. It has.. well, it is Web! and has VRML.. and it's your only option for N64 devkit. So, there's that. Overall you're right though. Entry level machine. I have one in working order, rarely has use next to Indigo2 MAX impact. I do have one Sparc, haven't been booted in ages. I have to check whether it's IPX or Classic. I'm even afraid to boot it up.

Comment by bilegeek 1 day ago

> People also like to restore the SGI Indy

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.

Comment by Doches 1 day ago

Oh, man; I got my hands on a (dead) one of these when I was a freshman in college (2004) and instead of trying to restore it my friends and I gutted it and used it as an original Xbox case mod. It was pretty satisfying to show up at LAN parties with what looked like a Solaris box and watch people boggle when we played Halo on it...

Comment by Findecanor 1 day ago

I've been wanting to get one for a PC mITX case mod. I love Sun's design language and the IPX cases are cute.

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.

Comment by outofmyshed 1 day ago

Not the greatest UNIX workstation in the world, but we had rooms full of them at my uni and I learned how to Internet on them. Still a lot of love for these.

Comment by pureagave 1 day ago

Great keyboard, great display, great OS. It was fast enough and a great terminal to bigger Sparcs if you needed it.

Comment by xenadu02 1 day ago

Making the default MAC address and machine serial number depend entirely on the NVRAM/RTC battery is... a choice. You'd think they would have used some fusible links to burn the original values into the hardware to fall back on if the battery died.

Comment by rasz 1 day ago

Nobody burns in MAC addresses. MAC is usually stored on eeprom. Either in BIOS or small i2c one on the NIC. Storing it in the nvram means you save $0.1 BOM, dont have to partition your bios chip and serialization becomes cheaper and faster. Its not like losing one is a problem, just bang a random number with Sun prefix and you will be statistically fine.

Comment by technothrasher 1 day ago

I went through replacing the NVRAM on an old Sun 3/80 about a year ago. Amusing adventure, and then fun to get to use BOOTP again to network boot. Lots of nostalgia. Boy how I had forgotten how primitive it was to use SunOS 4.1.3.

Comment by jrnichols 1 day ago

This was a lot of fun to see, especially part 3 where it boots up. Us older guys (me, anyway) still find joy in seeing these old machines we learned our skills on being restored like this.