Two other wrinkles:
a) I don't remember the full blow by blow, but on reflection, I don't
think my first mistake was forgetting to clear the root password, but
forgetting to clear the user password. The serial console was not in
/etc/securetty, so I couldn't log in directly as root, and I had to
circle back to enable the users login before I could su to root. I could
have redirected console from the kernel command line too and bypassed
the problem; and
b) when I went to make a backup of what was still on the fujitsu ide 1GB
harddisk, connecting the 20-year old debian install to a modern computer
with rsync was a challenge. I could make my way past ssh deprecations
(at least in one direction), but I got stuck with rsync protocol
incompatibilities. I ended up just piping tar through an ssh tunnel.
On 10/10/23 21:04, Russell Senior wrote:
So, I've been watching a YouTube channel of a local guy named Adrian
Black. His channel is called Adrian's Digital Basement. He's into
retro computing and does board repair to get old, broken, abandoned
computers working again, generally from the Apple II, Commodore 64
era, up to and including IBM AT era machines. Recently, he's mentioned
the Gravis UltraSound audio card a few times, which rang a bell with
me. I knew that I once had one, and that I probably still had it. Some
versions of it, I learned, are quite sought after in the retro
computer community. Or, at least sellers have the perception that they
are sought after. If you search on e-bay, you will find sellers asking
for $500-$1000 for (again) some version of them. They were unique at
the time in that they did mixing on the card, rather than in the CPU,
or something vaguely like that. They were producing really good
quality sound on PC-style computers before the CPUs were really fast
enough to be able to do the mixing. I remember having it in the
mid-late 1990s, and playing MOD files on it in a linux box. So, in a
moment of inspiration, I went down in the basement and looked for the
card. And, at first, I only found it visible from the outside of a
computer that was wedged behind some other things. So, a day goes by
and I'm thinking about it, and then last night I go back down in the
basement and extract the box from the corner it is tucked in and pop
it open. Sure enough, I have a Gravis UltraSound Plug & Play Version
1.0. It is one of the later versions. The date codes on the chips
suggest it was manufactured in the 2nd quarter of 1996 or maybe a
little later.
Well, so here in front of me is the box it is sitting in. I don't
remember very much about the machine it is in, except from the
markings it is: an ASUS P/I-P55TP4N motherboard, with ISA and PCI
slots, half the memory slots are filled, and it has a Fujitsu IDE hard
disk. Not really any idea how long it has been wedged in the corner,
except that it's probably been there for "a while". No idea if the
power supply even works. So, not wanting to risk the power supply
blowing up and killing the maybe-potentially-worth-something GUS (as
they were known, there is still support in modern kernels for these
boards), I pull the card out, find a PCI video card, a VGA monitor to
plug in, also an adapter for an AT-style chonky keyboard connector,
and with a little trepidation and sideways thoughts about the location
of the nearest fire extinguisher, I turn the power on.
And it whirs to life!
It became rapidly apparent that this had been a server of some kind,
because I had configured it with a serial console, so I find a
null-modem cable I can plug into a laptop to get a 9600 baud console
shell. Then I remember that I don't remember what the password is or
was. So, reboot again, and from the GRUB shell, I supply an
init=/bin/bash option to the kernel commandline, which boots me to a
semi-functional root shell. I remount the root filesystem read-write,
find the password hash in the /etc/passwd file (this was before i'd
caved into the modernity of /etc/shadow to hide the password hashes),
remove the hash so i can log in temporarily with no password, and
reboot. Now I can log in. Maybe or maybe not, I was too dumb to do the
same thing for root the first time, but maybe there are a few more
reboots, I'm not saying. Anyway, I am in. The machine is a 133MHz
Pentium-S, whatever that was. It has 64MB of RAM. The IDE hard disk is
1GB. It is running a 2.4.20 kernel. From looking at the log files, it
was shutdown sometime in May 2003, and it's running fine. I notice
that the system clock is in October 2023, which is a little
surprising, because the network configuration is wrong for what it is
plugged into (it had a static config, and the upstream network is
different than it once was). It gradually dawns on me that it has a
2023 date, not because of NTP, but because the realtime clock somehow
survived, unplugged and ticking, for >2 decades.
This evening I went downstairs to take a closer look at the battery,
and discovered that it's a Dallas DS12B887. And the clock is running
about 25 minutes slow. After 20 years and 5 months.
Anyway, I just wanted to share that.
