Or unless they *do* handle Medeco stuff. :-) Not that they're difficult to make if you want to. (Indeed, I've seen very few keys - none that I can recall offhand - which would be hard to synthesize from scratch if you care to bother, and have a decently equipped shop. Heck, when my father was in prison (he went to prison as a CO rather than serve in WWII) he made keys for the locks out of just what he, as an inmate, could lay his hands on; how hard can it be? /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Thanks for all the suggestions about the IBM Powerstations and AIX. I dragged my new collection out this weekend and was able to hack the boxes open and get the serial consoles working!. Luckily one of them (a 7011-250, forgot I had that one) had the lock left in Service - with that I was able to verify a working serial connection. Things progressed quickly after that. Using a screwdriver I pried the lid open on one of the locked (Normal key setting) Powerstation 7012-370's, was able to get the lid off and disassemble the lock and turn the switch to Service with a screwdriver. All with no permanent damage to the case or lock! I then could boot off an external plextor cdrom with the diagnostics disk, and verify things work. Btw, I was able to copy the IBM diagnostics disk with Nero; will try next to see if I can make a standard ISO image of the diagnostic cdrom using my freebsd box. So far I have one 250 with 48MB ram, a 370 with 64MB ram (one 8 x 8MB board), and a 360 with 128MB (two 8 x 8MB boards). They have some random 2GB scsi disks in them, and have ethernet interfaces for talking to the internets. Next step is to get AIX 4.3.3 install cdroms and reinstall everything. Oh, and find out what's in the other three 7012-370 boxes I have. With those I'll document (with photos) the "Breaking and Entering Into, and Hotwiring, a 7012-300 Series Box" saga. Thanks, Jeff --- Twelve Step "How to Mountain Bike" Program: Step One: Falling and Hurting Yourself A Great Deal

On Monday 27 June 2005 21:02, Scott Stevens wrote: Yeah, and it's a bit of work to figure out the first time, but easy enough to do in the comfort of your own home, assuming you're not completely mechanically incompetent. I've done it several times and have gotten good at it by now. :) Pat -- Purdue University ITAP/RCS --- http://www.itap.purdue.edu/rcs/ The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org

Dismantle, yes. Fragment, absolutely. Re-pin, no. I greatly respect your acumen, bot all of us are as dexterous, and you keep saying stuff like that as if it's a mortal sin not to be as adept or confident with a soldering iron or other hardware but yet still consider oneself a "decent hacker." I'm all thumbs with that stuff, and I'd rather have someone who knows how to do it, do it, then wreck hardware because I keep getting browbeaten about how I can't do it myself and should. -- ---------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Floodgap Systems Ltd * So. Calif., USA * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- The Commodore 64: the last true plug-and-play computer. --------------------

That's nothing to apologize about; you stop being "all thumbs" after you've torn apart and fragmented maybe a half-dozen units, and then you start figuring out how to put them back together. (Maybe for the first half-dozen you didn't even want to put them back together... but eventually the urge hits.) After a long while (years) you can tear down the most complicated geartrain and put it back together just because "it has to fit that way". You'll still end up with a few parts left over in the end once in a while! Tim.

FWIW, I do not consider myself to be anything like good enough to be a hacker, decent or otherwise. The only way to learn is to practice. Period. Yes, you will make mistakes, and at first you'll probably do things that at the time you don't have the skill to put right. You will end up with bits all round the room :-) (I speak from experience here). But you will also gain experience. Slowly you'll find you'll be able to get things back together again, that you will know what to undo and in what order, and so on. Obviously you don't practice on some rare/important (to you) machine. In this case, you might want to buy/obtain similar cabinet locks with the sole purpose of pulling them apart so as to see how they're made, and knowing that you probably won't get them all back togenter again. After a bit you will feel like working on your IBM system without worrying that you'll damage it. This is not a flame, but the attitude I find difficult to understand is not that you don't know something (damnit, there's plenty I don't know...), but that you don't intned to learn it. As I said , there's plenty I don't know, but I feel that should I need to work on <foo>, then I'll take the time to try to understand what I am doing... -tony

It appears to me that you consider there are 2 options : Risk the hardware by doing it yourself when you don't know what you are doing or get a professional to do it. There is, IMHO, a third option, and it's the one I always take. That is to learn to do the job properly yourself by practicing on non-valuable items. Even buyt things with the express intention of taking them apart, knowing you might not get them back together again. I've certainly done that. I disagree that it's 'far better' to get somebody else to do it. To me the best thing is to learn something. That's one reason I play about with classic computers, of course. -tony

You practice on things that are similar, but not so valuable. In this case, I am sure that similar locks were used on other machines/equipment. They may even be available new. YOu fiddle with those until you know what you are doing, then you work on the rare stuff... Other examples, not all on-topic. You know, I guess, that I also repair cameras. Before striping down a screw-mount Leica (a somewhat valuable camera), I practiced on the Russian Zorki and Fed cameras, which are close copies (although nowhere near as well made). Once I could get those right _then_ I pulled the top plate of the Leica. And before working on the Synchro-Compur shutter of a large-format lens, I would practice on the similar leaf shutters in the 35mm viewfinder cameras of the 1960s that are now available for peanuts... Before trying to change a chip on a multi-layer board in a rare machine, you practice soldering and desoldering on junk PC-clone boards. I have the opposite view. I think it's irresponsible not to learn something when you have the chance... 'Experience is directly proportioanl to equipment ruined' :-) More seriously, I was once lent a very rare machine (an HP95C for those who know HP calculators), much rarer than the IBM box we're talking about here. The owner knew, and fully understood, that I wanted to take it apart, and that there was a chance, albeit a slim one, that I would damage something. But that I intended to produce a full set of schemtics for the machine to help him, and other owners, repair them in the future. As it happend, I didn't do any damage, fortuantely. But the owner's attitude was that it was worth risking the machine to get this information. All I can say is that I've ruined enough components over the years -- including expensive and hard-to-replace ones to know that it _is_ the way to learn things. And electronic components generally can't be repaired. But mechanical bits can. Maybe you don't have the skills now, but you might well learn them later. In some ways I wish there were more people like you becuase then maybe, just maybe, somebody would pay me to fix their classics. But to he honest I'd much rather educate people to fix things themselves than do the job for them, for all the latter is likely to get me some cash... -tony

It's not (just) the fact I have residency to worry about. I'm more than happy to practise on stuff that's common or not that difficult to replace, and this is not to say that when faced with a defect, I don't try *at all* to fix it. And I've been able to get stuff working with my limited skills, and without enlisting much aid. But on the devices that mean something to me, I'm not willing to risk ending up with a dead box just so I can 'learn something' by potentially farking it up. I'd rather have someone who knows something about the device help with/do those kinds of repairs, especially if they're easily available. That's not laziness or ennui, that's pragmatism. I can learn on lesser devices. Please correct me, but what I perceived you to say loudly and clearly was that the original poster should go ahead and 'learn something' by disassembling the lock on a machine that means something to him, something that could potentially render the machine inoperable if he extracts the lock wrong, or messes up with pins, or goodness knows. He can learn to re-pin a lock with something else. An AIX server, to me, would be an expensive way to learn and it doesn't make any sense when a competent locksmith can do the job and save the machine (and he could buy a cheap lock somewhere and learn how locks work with that). Maybe AIX servers are a dime a dozen where you are, but I think I'll start with something smaller. -- ---------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Floodgap Systems Ltd * So. Calif., USA * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Eggheads unite! You have nothing to lose but your yolks. -- Adlai Stevenson

On this point, we will agree to disagree. I don't know about his specific unit. On my ANSes, I could probably short it, and I think some of the older POWERservers might be similarly tweaked. I'd rather have the key, though. -- ---------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ -- Cameron Kaiser, Floodgap Systems Ltd * So. Calif., USA * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you find a rock. ---------

Even if you don't note down the order, it's fairly easy to determine by trial and erorr if yoyu have the right key -- try each pin in the first hole until you find one that's level with the top of the plug (inner cylinder), repeat for all the other holes. -tony

On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, Gordon JC Pearce wrote: Tony is hardcore enough to mill his own key to fit the keyway; and turn pins on a lathe. Medeco locks are very difficult to pick. If you turn spool pins, with "false gates" both vertically and rotationally, they would be way harder to pick than would be reasonable for the use. Somewhere at the bottom of my biggest pile of junk, I have a Medeco lock where it is now. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

True. That's why not everyone can bite off everything. And every once in a while you sit back and realize what you will never get around to doing. I don't think there's any shortage of skills to learn, technologies to master, or stuff to play with. Tim.

Hey, I have a few of these Powerstation 7015-370's and have some parts left over: - Memory boards, filled with IBM 8MB simms. Each board has 64MB. The Powerstation 370's all have 2 slots for boards. - The highly sought-after GT4X 3-slot (MCA) video card set:, with the "pipe" card option: - ppr0 00-02 POWER Gt4 Midrange Graphics Adapter - pgr0 00-03 POWER Gt4 Midrange 8-bit Frame Buffer - pop0 00-04 POWER Gt4 Midrange 24-bit Frame Buffer - ppc0 00-02-01 POWER Gt4x Midrange Graphics Adapter Turbo option The GT4X has what looks to be a VGA connector on it. All my other rs6k boxes have the mildly sought-after standard RGB video connectors. If you want any other parts (fans, cpu board, regular MCA rgb cards, power supply ,etc) let me know. I have too much stuff, so it's going at the end of the July 4th weekend. Since I'm going to run these beasts headless and don't need more than one box running, anyone who wants a multi-board mca video card that doubles as a space heater, or some memory, just pay shipping and it's yours. Jeff