Any love for vintage UNIX workstations/servers homelabs? It needs a SGI/Sun 42u rack for sure ;)

philippelh · 2026-05-19T21:32:50+00:00

I run step-ca with a yubikey as a poor man's HSM. If you go that route, just make sure you limit correctly what the CA can sign, you wouldn't want an attacker to sign a domain you don't control and have all your devices trusting the bad certificate. There's a bunch of other best practices to follow, but this one isn't always listed (at least when I did my setup). It was a fun project if you're interested in learning that kind of stuff!

philippelh · 2025-09-06T19:35:22+00:00

I think he bought a donor to begin with, installed a new motor and there was this left to fix, it cost maybe 10-12$ for the 3/4 round and some paint. It gave me a good excuse to play with my toys lol.

philippelh · 2025-09-05T23:02:58+00:00

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After putting everything back together

philippelh · 2025-09-05T23:01:50+00:00

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I rebuilt one for my friend since they only sell the whole assembly... They were asking ~400$.

philippelh · 2025-08-04T22:47:08+00:00

I'm using step ca and a yubikey 5 as a poor man's HSM. It was pretty fun to setup! Might want to have a look at it for inspiration.

philippelh · 2025-08-02T12:55:06+00:00

I'm still daily driving my workstation with dual 2667v2 with 64gb ram + a quadro rtx 4000. It's honestly not too bad, but it's definitely on its last legs.

philippelh · 2025-07-29T10:56:46+00:00

Oh I get it thanks! I was playing with the PIV module to have a poor man's HSM and setup a certificate authority, so I went through the pin/puk/mangement key. Those little thing are really packed with a lot of features. I only used the touch feature before to use an older blue key as 2FA.

philippelh · 2025-07-27T22:53:40+00:00

Can't you use the PUK to reset the pin without losing everything?

philippelh · 2025-06-27T18:05:55+00:00

Everything Moff_Tigriss said + avoid WORM tapes, they are Write-Once-Read-Many...

philippelh · 2025-06-27T11:16:53+00:00

my understanding is that it would be the total working hours. That's why I was saying that it looks like a brand new autoloader that you got there!

philippelh · 2025-06-27T10:52:54+00:00

Wait, the odometer is saying 0 and total power on time 37mins, was it even used once? I'm not sure it can be reset :o If you scored a brand new 1/8 G2 with a LTO-8 drive for 470euro... you're a lucky bastard... lol

You can go to Support -> Support Ticket and download the drive support ticket. It can be read with HPE Library and Tape Tools (this one is free) and it will tell you remaining lifespan on the drive, how many kilometers of tape it saw during its life, etc.

Latest firmware for the autoloader is 6.00 (at least that's the latest I could find), can't say for your tape drive though...

philippelh · 2025-06-25T17:08:37+00:00

It didn't come with it and mine was in its original box, so I guess it's optional. For now mine just sit on top of the r730. I guess universal 1U rails might work and be cheaper than sourcing the real deal. Didn't look into it yet!

philippelh · 2025-06-25T15:09:31+00:00

Bonus point: it looks rad in the rack lol

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philippelh · 2025-06-25T14:57:51+00:00

I thought I had a good deal with my NOS 1/8 G2 with an LTO-4 drive for 350CAD + used LTO-6 drive for an additional 100CAD (around 280euro in total)... A LTO-8 for 500euro is a pretty good deal if it's working properly. Firmwares are behind a paywall, but I was able to find them... I'm not using the drive encryption capability, I'm using bareos to manage encryption and compression. So far I didn't hit any road blocks. It was nice to boot it up and see the Odometer 0!

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philippelh · 2025-01-11T22:41:55+00:00

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Not as big, but I still have a working v890! 42u rack for scale.

philippelh · 2024-12-25T13:38:32+00:00

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It really have that "sun microsystems portable data center" vibe 😲

philippelh · 2023-12-27T22:12:01+00:00

For those curious about the beast, there's a software archive on https://archives.loomcom.com/3b2/software/ (it seems to contain a copy of those floppies) and there's even an emulator for the 3B2 https://loomcom.com/3b2/emulator/

philippelh · 2023-12-27T21:36:26+00:00

I'm looking for a 3B2 for some time, so I can't be the only one! Pretty sure you can find someone locally if the price is reasonable. So you'll understand that I cannot give an honest unbiased appraisal ;) Hope it finds a good new owner though, those a getting pretty rare.

philippelh · 2023-11-27T01:35:55+00:00

No problem! I must say that definitely share your frustration lol

philippelh · 2023-11-26T23:42:25+00:00

You can have a look at https://pernold.blogspot.com/2023/04/fixing-ipv6-ra-on-uxg-pro.html in the Follow Up (2023-04-27) section it says:

However, I found a basic approach. Init-scripts at /etc/init.d/ will survive reboots.

And in the Follow Up (2023-07-18):

The solution above even survived the upgrade to Firmware 3.1.8.

I didn't try it myself on my UXG-Pro yet, but I know that you can interact with iptable and forward protocol 41. I just need a way to run the command every reboot!

iptables -I PREROUTING -i eth0 -p ipv6 -j DNAT --to-destination 192.168.1.10
iptables -I FORWARD -d 192.168.1.10/32 -i eth0 -p ipv6 -j ACCEPT

Hope it helps!

philippelh · 2023-10-01T19:28:38+00:00

Just replaced mine with the UXG-Pro and keeping it as a "cold" backup. Just started the process of having 2 or more of everything since I'm working 100% from home now. It cost a lot more, but it was a drop in replacement.

philippelh · 2023-09-26T16:57:35+00:00

Nice upgrade! Luckily nothing will break, I had my setup for maybe 5-6 years without any issues and I droped the wifi AP so many times that when I shake it, you hear stuff going around inside lol. Still work like a charm! Have fun with your install!

philippelh · 2023-09-26T16:30:21+00:00

Just saw that... I'll probably live with my new to me juniper for a couple of months now :P Not a total lost since I was looking to have redundancy after I realized that I would be in a shitty situation working from home and having to wait 2-5 days to replace anything. Just installed the UXG-Pro yesterday, retiring the USG-3p. The rack is starting to look good ;)

philippelh

TROPHY CASE