ClassicCmp story: when I was at my university (Florida International University, Miami, FL), studying computer science, I managed to get in league with a professor (Dr. Milani) to let me take independent study with him, and use the computers in his lab; see, it was sort of the elite lab on campus, the only one outfitted with the then 'super cool' Silicon Graphics Indy and Indigo 2 machines. I'd always jonesed for having one of these, even though they're now outdated for any 'real' work besides terminal duties. I'd run across many on ebay (they're super cheap now), and even saw a prototype Indy at 'Weird Stuff' in but never got around to buying one. See, I'm the kind of classic cmp collector that lets the computer come to him, with the off exception (Timex Sinclair 2068 was ebay bought). Some of my cohorts (Miwa and Gouku) from my days at the University, decided to stay on there working as SysAdmins for the campus computers. They told me that every so often, as systems come to the end of their life, they usually get torn into, all the useful recyclables get extracted (memory and hard drives if they're of any usable size), and their now lifeless corpses get sent to 'surplus'. This is where a gentleman gets their university serial number, marks them as 'gone' from inventory, and they usually get bought out in lots at auctions held every so often. My guess is for metal scrap or some other ill end. These same cohorts go by the surplus building regularly and walk by the soon to be scrapped systems looking for gems to be rescued. At one point, they ran into an SGI system and mentioned it to me, knowing I was interested. However, because of delayed in communication, by the time we mobilized to acquire the system it was gone. Bummer! "Keep an eye out and grab'em when you see any SGI's." I told them, and they said "ok". About a year later, they message me on IRC and say 'Hey, guess what we got you.' I was happy beside myself. When we arrange for the 'drop' at the university campus parking garage: In the trunk of the car they had TWO SGI's for me: an Indigo 2 and an Indy! On the torn stickers affixed to their shells they had their names, Frontier and Pioneer. These were two of the systems from my lab! The lab had been dismantled a few years after a graduated for office space and the systems moved to another room/lab. With much glee I transferred them to my car and ran off as fast as I could before lighting would strike me, with so much luck on my side. I've got them at home; the Indigo 2 had a padlock on it, which I made short work of with a dremel. Opened it up, and it has all of its memory and harddrive- 32Megs and a 1G drive! The Indy had its drive, but no memory. I tried to boot the Indigo 2, but no luck; it would die trying to repair the boot drive. I had a spare scsi drive and a Indy compatible cdrom drive, and a copy of Irix 6.5. I tried to make the Indigo 2 boot with that, but there was no love- aparently the scsi card has some problems and the cdrom keeps on timing out and resetting the scsi bus. I had some spare ram that would work in the Indy, put a replacement drive in it, and after some false starts (didn't know the boot disk had to be SCSI Id 1 on Indys) managed to get most of Irix onto it. Its running quite nicely given its near 9 years of age. So onto the real question here: The outsides are in great shape, but it appears there were some fears of theft in the new lab and they put those aluminum anchors that you thread the cable through and padlock on one end so the equipment doesn't 'Walk away'. I'd like to try and remove this without damaging the case. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions? There seems to be a rubber like material between the aluminum anchor and the computer itself, and I was thinking of poking at it with a razor blade or the like. Looking for better alternatives, though. Louis