I went out to the swap meet today, but I couldn't get excited about anything there. I'd gone out hoping to find a Sun workstation or some such, and nothing. Closest I got to interesting was the guy offering a stripped bare P2 laptop -- no battery, no hard drive, no CD, no floppy, and a busted screen -- for $100. Oh wait, not interesting -- crack-induced. That's what I meant. (Yeah yeah yeah parts nothing.) So I took off to go see Cal, since I was (sort of) in the neighbourhood. I was a lot happier when I found the upstairs where they'd hid the good stuff -- including a [SparcStation LX][3] and a Sun External Hard Drive, model 411 (4.5GB Seagate Barracuda, baby!). Even managed to find a keyboard and a cable and a 25-to-9-pin serial adapter. I was briefly tempted to buy an SGI keyboard, which looked like it'd been made to beat Communists to death, but resisted. Stuffed it in my backpack and brought it home...man, those things are pigs. I hooked up a serial port, tried the magic keycodes, and nothing. After wiggling the keyboard cable a bit I could get the keyboard to beep at power-on (speaker in a keyboard? no wonder Sun's got such a good rep...:-), but nothing else -- not even the caps lock light. Well, what about networking? Yep, it's working, and appears to be convinced that it's kootenay.cs.ubc.ca judging by the ypbind requests. A quick nmap and rpcinfo -p confirmed that all it had open was portmapper and ypbind. Allegedly, the POST has failed if the caps lock key doesn't flash -- but surely it wouldn't be running RPC services if that were true. ..which is going to make cracking it over the crossover cable a little difficult. It's not exporting any directories. I figure I can spoof the domain, but then what? In other news: Firefox moved the tab select key from Ctrl to Alt (ie, Alt-3 selects the 3rd tab). I thought this feature was completely gone a few versions back, and was quite sad. Finally figuring it out makes me happy.
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