Also, if you happen to have the dingus that lets you plug a normal SVGA monitor into an SGI Indy, I could give that a good home too.
Update: Nevermind, rukzise found a crack that got me back in.
Irix CDs?
Hey, I remembered that I still have an SGI O2 sitting on the shelf in my laundry room! Unfortunately, what I don't remember is the root password, and I think the only sane way to reset it is with an Irix install CD. Do any of you have one that you can snail-mail to me?
Tags: computers, firstperson, lazyweb, retrocomputing
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34 Responses:
If no one coughs up their copy, you are welcome to borrow mine. I have 6.5, 6.5.15, and possibly 6.2. You can boot from 6.5 for sure, IIRC 6.5.15. The Indy should be happy with either, as I've gotten 6.5.15 on a Challenge S just fine.
ah, nostalgia
I have IRIX 6.4 for Origin, Onyx2, and OCTANE; here in my hand, and I think I have 6.5 or 6.3 or 6.1 or something, somewhere else that I can look for.
Icon love
I have IRIX 6.3 for O2, I could probably throw together an ISO if that'll work, or just mail it. I don't have an O2 anymore, so it's of no use to me.
In email.
Problem is, Irix bootable CDs aren't "ISOs", they're some other crazy format, that you can burn with cdrecord on Linux, but not with Disk Utility on OSX, so that doesn't help...
Damn. I was hoping a bin/cue set would work out for that whole routine.
Maybe there's a way to burn them on OSX, but I don't know it.
Toast or http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net/
Hmm I used to look after 30 x Indys (and a smaller number of O2s) .. the Indy's had a password reset jumper on the motherboard. Did the O2's?
That's for the PROM password, not the Irix root password.
Depending on what version of IRIX is running on the bug, there might be a cute little bug in the login screen. I remember exploiting this [and subsequently telling the admin about it, with the result being that the IRIX box was removed ;] back in 1999. I think either IRIX 6.3 or IRIX 6.5 was running on the box.
Look whether you can access the help from the login screen. If you can, there should be a way to print from the help. There you should be able to set the print command. I remember setting it to xterm and being presented with a nice and shiny shell. From there you only need to get local root, but that's pretty trivial with IRIX. The lpstat exploit comes to mind.
Cheers,
.:Ralf:.
I can log in as me, I just can't escalate to root. If it's so trivial, tell me how, because an hour of googling exploits got me nowhere. Irix 6.5.0.
Ah. I see. Try this then: http://www.milw0rm.com/exploits/265. It should work. If not, I can dig out others, but I have to rack my brains a little to remember where I can find the complete LSD IRIX exploit collection. I don't think milw0rm carries them all.
Cheers,
.:Ralf:.
Hey, that worked! I'm in. Thanks!
Snark and ye shall be rewarded.
You can't just use the monitor to grab the hash from /etc/passwed and crack that?
That's what I did with some Indigo2's that came my way.
At one point in time I also ended up with an O2 with an unknown root password. I actually had a SCSI card lying around so I ended up just pulling the O2's drive, attaching it to a Linux system, and using a hex editor (SGI XFS and Linux XFS aren't compatible...) to replace the root password with the result of encrypting a known string. Presto, root access. I never did figure out what to do with it though and I think it ended up in my parents' garage last time I moved...
-John
I have the Irix 6.5.22 update box still in the shrink wrap sitting on a shelf here (6.5.23 and later only run on 64bit clean, so if yours isn't an R10k, 6.5.22 is the final release for it). If you still need it, the email address in my profile is valid. Send me an address. Your O2 should have a standard VGA connector on the back (the O2 RM5200 and the O2 R10000s I have here do, anyway).
jwz,
I can't remember if the O2 spit out sync on separate pins or was sync-on-green, but I do have 5-6 of the 13W3-DE15 connectors that will let you plug in the monitor. I need to see where I put them, however.
I'll followup with a comment if I find them tonight.
I'm 98.2% sure they're sync-on-green, but it's been many years since I've turned my O2 on.
O2's are sync on green.
Actually, I think it outputs both SoG and separate sync. I remember that on some monitors the picture would be green-shifted, which I ascribed to the monitor not correctly subtracting the sync level from the green signal, while using the HV sync.
Not that this is really important or interesting. Uncontrollable geek impulse to spout useless trivia.
O2s have an SVGA connector on them that works fine with my modern LCD screen. But I also have an Indy on the shelf, and that's got the wacky connector with ten pins and 3 round thingies. I have nothing that plugs into that.
That would be 13W3, and it requires a monitor that understands how to handle sync on green.
Many SVGA monitors can't do this. I will still try to hunt down an adapter for you.
Being a former Sun employee from the late 90's, I have the doohiky you seek. I will drop it off at the DNA sometime this weekend and leave it for you.
Well I take that back, it has the wrong set of genders. Perhaps it's time slog down to Weird Stuff in Sunnyvale.
The 13w3-HD15 adapters that work with Sun hardware do not work with SGI hardware. Sadly the pinouts were never exactly standardized, so NeXT, Intergraph, SGI, Sun, IBM, and everyone else who used that plug each picked their own pinouts to some degree. Much to the dismay of nerds and collectors a decade or more later.
Or if you're feeling adventurous, yank the disk and hook it up to a linux box with XFS support, it's been in there for aeons but does mean finding an SCA adaptor. More useful in the greater scheme of things to get and copy some install CDs though; I've got 6.5.21 but I suspect you can't be bothered ftping them.
the hatterWow. Yeah, a laundry room is about the best place I can think of for an O2, too. That was really around the beginning of the end for SGI, dying its lingering, scribe-like death.
When we got them at MIT (some departments required SGI because of their still superior graphics performance at that time), the release manager at one point said, deadpan, "I went to [department store going out of business]. All they had left were toasters. They were blue. And they ran Irix 6.2." There's really not more thank you can say about the machine than that.
Maybe you had to have been there.
s/thank/that/. Need more coffee.
SGI was indeed sunk by then, but I think the O2 was a fine machine. It was beautifully engineered, especially how all the components just racked in and out. Everyone likes to bust on Irix, but I think it was a fine OS, and it is indisputably the case that the Irix X server is the only one that has ever WORKED in the history of X11 before or since.
You can download a relatively recent, net-bootable version of IRIX from the SGI website if you are signed up on their site. I've rooted an SGI machine through SASH from the diagnostic menu and I remember it being kind of self-explanatory, but hell if I remember now. You could just plug the drive into a Linux box and edit the passwd file but that would be cheating. ;)