alt Hacker NewsWe 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).
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A BlueSCSI[0] might be an interesting thing to add if you want to alleviate the hard disk sound.
Out of morbid curiosity, is there a recovery plan for when it inevitably experiences a hardware failure?
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?
> 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.)
dump that disk asap!!!!!
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.