Getting Started, Documentation, Tips & Tricks

Hey Everyone,
I figure after popping in about 3 years ago to try to (unsuccessfully) cobble together some Indys from parts, that I should properly say hello. Three years ago I bought a bone stock, fresh 6.5.30 installed Octane 2 because I have been in love with a little blue SGI since first seeing an Indigo that had been donated to my church's tech drive in the late 90's. When I bought the Octane 2 I was really looking for an Indigo but couldn't find an Indigo that was in good shape / complete so I settled for what I call the "big sister".

Well, I finally pulled the trigger and bought an R4000 XZ Indigo which got delivered about a week or so ago. Got a keyboard adapter from Chris and plugged it in, no surprise, dead TOD battery. No problem, swapped it for a CR2302 holder and now she boots right up. Problem is that all five of the user accounts on the system have a password. The system has IRIX 5.3 installed on it btw. Will I need to toss the Indigo's system drive into an external case and plug it into the Octane to reset the passwords? Will this create any sort of an issue with the different versions of IRIX as far as file systems are concerned? I would love to get "baby sister" up and running without having to source out 5.3 media off eBay just yet (I do want it down the road in case I need it).

Thanks in advance for any insight. Oh, and beyond poking around with the Octane 2, I have pretty much zero unix experience. I just love the aestetics of the systems and want to learn more about how to use them and keep them running.

welcome (again)

if you don't have the password then you have several options:
- boot from cd or network, mount the disk
- boot another disk (where you know the passwords of course) and then mount the "locked" disk
- mount the disk somewhere else

Irix 5.3 is full of holes, any one of a number of these should get you in, link:

http://www.exploit-db.com/platform/?p=irix

Note there are three pages in total.

Wow, thanks for the link! Time to get to reading. Otherwise I'll try mounting the disk in an external enclosure to my Octane.

vishnu wrote: Irix 5.3 is full of holes, any one of a number of these should get you in, link:

http://www.exploit-db.com/platform/?p=irix

most of them are local tho and it doesn't say which patches were applied to the test system. either way as always with older systems, as long as you don't make default services available to the outside you should be fine.
further for a number of older systems 5.3 is the only way of running elf binaries which is quite a must if you wanna have any kind of more recent software. and 5.3 is fast and light. 6.2 or even 6.5 on an indy for example is slightly overkill

however, depending on your machine make sure you run at least 5.2 because 5.1 and 5.0.x were not so great

Plus I'm sure there's no one out there looking for Irix boxes to crack into, in fact probably the last remaining Internet facing Irix box was the Origin Pete used to use to host this place...

Welcome. I like your church if you get SGI's in tech drives.

I can think of worse ways to get introduced to Unixy things than an Irix box (though my first introduction was on BSD/386).

Hi.