from Hacker News

Restoring a Sun SPARCstation IPX part 1: PSU and NVRAM (2020)

by ibobev on 3/9/26, 3:23 PM with 54 comments

  • by codejake on 3/9/26, 4:52 PM

    We still have a SPARC IPX in production, hosting an antiquated database. The hard drive sounds like grinding metal. I've been trying to get rid of it for years. I succeeded once, but it was brought back from the dead. This thing has been running with the original parts since 1993 to 2026, minus ~1 year of downtime.

    Nobody has the root password anymore, but fortunately, it's vulnerable to at least seven remote root sunrpc exploits. We "log in" by running a Python script that pops a root shell.

    No, I am not kidding.

    Edit: Checked out records: purchased and brought online in 1993.

    Edit 2: In response to "why don't you just change the password?". When I asked, I was told they "can't" because they'd "lose access to the database". I didn't ask them to elaborate, because it would have opened a whole new can of horror worms, but I removed it from the Internet (it's on a non-routable, weakly "air gapped" network now).

  • by bradleyy on 3/9/26, 5:43 PM

    Everybody hating on the IPX, but I have so much nostalgia. Yes, my friends who ran a repair shop kept employed fixing them, like transmission shops survive on minivan transmissions.

    That era hardware (although I ended up with a fair bit of experience on the whole Sun 3/4 lines)... I had just gotten out of the Army, didn't know what I was going to be when I grew up, and the future was so terrifying but bright.

    It's a good thing that I don't horde (except cars, that's a problem), because I'd have racks of these things. Named after Star Trek characters, not because I care about it, but because that was the naming convention at one of my first "real jobs".

    IDK, maybe nobody else thinks this way, but I'm really glad to see someone fixing one.

  • by epakai on 3/9/26, 8:21 PM

    I got a IPX in 2022 and restored it. I was a bit lucky and mine was an ex-IBM unit that came with the Weitek SPARC POWER μP processor (80 MHz) upgrade.

    It makes for a pretty good project box as one of the smaller SPARC machines. Lots of documentation from hobbyists, Sun's own service manuals, and OpenBSD/NetBSD. Flash SCSI disk replacements are much easier to get your hands on now (I used a ZuluSCSI).

    I've kept a log with photos: https://drislock.org/pkb/machines/perfect.html#a-little-lunc...

    It seems to have been part of IBM's IBM-IPT Tester system. Hostnames were interesting: flower, owl, piglet, diamond, hotlips. I didn't get any interesting data though since this system relied on network resources.

  • by jasoneckert on 3/9/26, 4:30 PM

    God that machine was terrible - underpowered and undercooled, which led to frequent overheating and component failures. When I first started at Sun, they put one of those on my desk as a joke on my first day (it was quickly replaced so that I could get some real work done).

  • by Doches on 3/9/26, 6:00 PM

    Oh, man; I got my hands on a (dead) one of these when I was a freshman in college (2004) and instead of trying to restore it my friends and I gutted it and used it as an original Xbox case mod. It was pretty satisfying to show up at LAN parties with what looked like a Solaris box and watch people boggle when we played Halo on it...

  • by outofmyshed on 3/9/26, 5:56 PM

    Not the greatest UNIX workstation in the world, but we had rooms full of them at my uni and I learned how to Internet on them. Still a lot of love for these.

  • by technothrasher on 3/9/26, 7:54 PM

    I went through replacing the NVRAM on an old Sun 3/80 about a year ago. Amusing adventure, and then fun to get to use BOOTP again to network boot. Lots of nostalgia. Boy how I had forgotten how primitive it was to use SunOS 4.1.3.

  • by jrnichols on 3/9/26, 5:38 PM

    This was a lot of fun to see, especially part 3 where it boots up. Us older guys (me, anyway) still find joy in seeing these old machines we learned our skills on being restored like this.

    Thanks for posting this one. good find.

  • by xenadu02 on 3/9/26, 8:28 PM

    Making the default MAC address and machine serial number depend entirely on the NVRAM/RTC battery is... a choice. You'd think they would have used some fusible links to burn the original values into the hardware to fall back on if the battery died.

  • by Joyfield on 3/10/26, 1:49 AM

    I have one working (not the disk though) here at home.

  • by alexhormozi on 3/9/26, 5:18 PM

    oh yeah that's interesting