[SunRescue] Rescued a Model 712/60

[Sam Creasey]

On Tue, 29 May 2001, Ken Caruso wrote:

>
> Hello All,
>
> 	I just rescued a HP 712/60 without a CD-Rom or floppy. It has
> HP/UX installed but I do not have root for the machine. Couple of
> questions:
>
> 	Does anyone have any reccomendations for OS, HP-UX is one of the
> few mainstream commercial unices I have never dabbled with. I would
> imagine NetBSD would scream on it. It has 64m of ram.

I'd recommend nextstep...  that's what my 712/80 is running, and I've been
happiest there out of HPUX, NeXTstep, and linux...  (though, admittedly,
I haven't tried linux on it for about a year, and it was not ready for
prime time when I was playing with/developing on it).  NeXTstep is
extremely pretty if you are lucky enough to have gotten a 712 with the
24bit "artist" graphics (what mine has).

> 	Can I boot of a PC-SCSI cdrom or Sun CDROM, I have both.

I booted mine with the plextor 4x I use to boot everything.  jumpered to
512-byte sectors, *I think*.  don't think it cares which scsi id the cdrom
is on, just boots with a normal sd() device.

> 	Any thing worth mentioning in general with these machines?

They'd be a nice little RISC workstation if you could get a good OS onto
one.  (like a linux port that didn't suck).

I haven't found an mp3 player with nextstep support which can keep up with
44khz in real time on the 712/80 either, though I'd bet that mpg123 could
do it if you hacked in support for the somewhat wonky next sound driver.

> 	Any easy way to root this box from the console without booting
> from cdrom or floppy? I guess depending on how old the version of HP-UX
> is, it might be easier to break in from the network (it does have dhcp
> enabled :).

Remove HD.  Mount UFS drive in other machine.  Remove root's password.
This would be my method of doing this.  (unless I'm fucking up, and HP-UX
doesn't actually use ufs (or a sane enough ufs to mount it elsewhere).

-- Sam

Computer games don't affect kids. I mean if Pacman affected our generation as
kids, we'd all run around in a darkened room munching pills and listening to
repetitive music.
        -- Unknown