Restoring a Sun SPARCstation IPX part 1: PSU and NVRAM (2020)
70 points - today at 3:23 PM
SourceWe 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).
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.
greatquux
today at 7:44 PM
You absolutely can run 32bit Solaris in qemu SPARC emulation. 64bit is not there yet unfortunately. But definitely dd this and get it virtualized!
EvanAnderson
today at 7:33 PM
A BlueSCSI[0] might be an interesting thing to add if you want to alleviate the hard disk sound.
[0] https://bluescsi.com/
ThrowawayR2
today at 6:25 PM
Out of morbid curiosity, is there a recovery plan for when it inevitably experiences a hardware failure?
jeffrallen
today at 7:25 PM
Buy parts from RS and fix it, silly.
linksnapzz
today at 5:20 PM
This box needs an official retirement ceremony when the database is migrated.
If you get a root shell once, why not change the root password then?
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.
adrianmonk
today at 6:08 PM
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.
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.
SSH v1 protocol would work; but it’s still considered insecure by SSH clients of the last two decades :-)
orthogonal_cube
today at 5:44 PM
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.
> 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.)
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.
pureagave
today at 7:10 PM
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.
technothrasher
today at 7:54 PM
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.
outofmyshed
today at 5:56 PM
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.
pureagave
today at 7:13 PM
Great keyboard, great display, great OS. It was fast enough and a great terminal to bigger Sparcs if you needed it.
jasoneckert
today at 4:30 PM
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).
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 LuleĂĄ and was really weighted down with a trunk full of pizza boxes.
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.
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.
There is an irony that Wine is the most stable linux ABI for
GUI applications in 2026.
Only some people who were around at that time welcomed Windows NT; others decried the various failings of Microsoft…
sixothree
today at 5:41 PM
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.
seanhunter
today at 4:52 PM
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
jrnichols
today at 5:38 PM
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.
Thanks for posting this one. good find.
alexhormozi
today at 5:18 PM
oh yeah that's interesting