eric’s extremeboredom

Well, for us at least.

Today I finally got rid of the very last SCO OpenUNIX system at work, and boy are we happy. After actually having used one of SCO’s products I can safely say that all the shit they get from, well, the entire IT community at this point is completly justified - they have no product anyone they want and are comletly desperate. The system crashes randomly all the time (even when sitting completly idle for three weeks), is slow as dirt, and just totally sucks.

One very intresting thing about the OS is how they have the filesystem set up. The entire system resides in /opt/K/SCO/ with symlinks into /bin, /usr/bin, etc.

Snip of /bin directory listing:

ls -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/bin/ls
lx -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/bin/ls
m4 -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/bin/m4
mail -> /opt/K/SCO/MailUA/1.0.4a/usr/bin/mail
mc68k -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/bin/false
mcs ->  /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/usr/bin/mcs
mesg -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/bin/mesg
mkdir -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/bin/mkdir
mkfifo -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/bin/mkfifo
mt -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/bin/mt
mv -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/bin/cp
ncheck -> /opt/K/SCO/Unix/5.0.5Eb/etc/ncheck

And be sure to add /etc to your path. Yes, I said /etc. Among the configuration files are lots of binaries, to keep them company perhaps?

Snip of file types in /etc:

/etc/smmck:	sh commands text
/etc/smuxtcl:	ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386
/etc/snmp:	directory
/etc/snmpd:	ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386
/etc/snmpd.comm:	ascii text
/etc/snmpd.conf:	ascii text
/etc/snmpd.peers:	ascii text
/etc/snmpd.trap:	ascii text
/etc/statd:	ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386
/etc/strcf:	ascii text
/etc/strcf.d:	directory
/etc/suds_ctrl:	ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386
/etc/swap:	ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386
/etc/sysadm.d:	directory
/etc/sysdef:	ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386
/etc/sysdump:	iAPX 386 COFF demand-paged executable
/etc/syslog.conf:	English text
/etc/syslog.pid:	ascii text
/etc/syslogd:	ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386
/etc/systemid:	ascii text
/etc/talkd:	ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386

I spent half of yesterday/part of this morning attempting to do a full drive backup with no luck, first I tried taring to an ssh pipe, which resulted in a broken pipe for some reason after about 50 megs.

tar clzf - / | ssh ericb@server1 cd /service/archive/server2\;cat > root.tar.gz

Next I tried an NFS mount which died taking the entire system down with it after about 30 seconds.

And finally I tried a pipe to smbclient which went at about 1MB/minute and eventaually stalled never to send a byte again.

So I scratched the full backup idea, had someone manually backup important files, and ended SCO’s rain of hell on the company once and forall.

Categorized as Technology, Me, Work