12 Oct
2001
12 Oct
'01
4:06 p.m.
Today I finally had time to play with the Powerserver 320H
that I found a few days ago. I disassembled the thing and
circumvented the keylock switch issue (I was able to pull the
keylock pistons away without destroying anything) and plugged
a terminal to it in serial port #1.
1) It boots. The numeric diagnostic LEDs on front go through
lots of messages, the HD spins up and does quite some work,
I assume it checks the filesystems and so on. Finally,
some initialization messages appear on the terminal;
they seem to report on the very last stage of the
rc script sequence (like bringing up tcp/ip and the like).
I think that the serial console is recognized only after
it switches to some multi-user run level.
2) It runs AIX version 3.
3) The SIMMs that I had talked about worked in this machine, so
now it has 32MB instead of the original 16MB.
4) the login msg reads something like
IBM AIX version 3 RS6000 (C) 1989, 1990
Console Login:
How do I get inside?
Carlos.
At 11:23 PM 9/28/01 -0400,I wrote:
Today I came by an RS6000 7012-320H (Powerserver 320).
On topic, since it was introduced in '91.
It seems to have 16MB RAM, a SCSI card, an 800MB HD,
25MHZ cpu and a 8-port serial card. No framebuffer.
There was an 8mm tape unit that came with it. Oh, and,
from what I can gather from the IBM web site, it is
missing some sort of "ethernet riser card" which seems
to provide the means to drive enet starting from a
network header on the mainboard. I should be getting
some of the terminals that were hooked to this
beast. However, I have neither keys nor AIX install
media. So I have several questions:
1) Which OS' (besides some old version of AIX) run on this
box? Or, if I am stuck with AIX, in addition to
praying that the HD is still alive, how could I
break in and change the root password?
2) What exactly is this "ethernet riser card"? Do I have
a network-less system?
3) Late last year, I posted a message to this list about
some SIMMs that I grabbed off an AS400 system; they
look like 72pin SIMMs but have a slightly different
form factor and won't fit in a standard 72 pin socket.
The thing is, they seem to fit the sockets in this
system. And, that AS400 was equipped with exactly the
same model of HD that this RS6000 has. So I am
wondering if those 4MB SIMMS will fit this system,
which is filled with 2MB SIMMS...
carlos.
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Carlos E. Murillo-Sanchez carlos_murillo(a)nospammers.ieee.org
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Carlos E. Murillo-Sanchez carlos_murillo(a)nospammers.ieee.org