Gregory's Server|
96 comments
 SunOS 4.1.4 says it can't possibly be the year 2023: "WARNING: preposterous time in filesystem -- CHECK AND RESET THE DATE!" sorry SunOS, there's nothing i can do to fix 2023. @tubetime I booted a NeXTstation in Sep 2022 and just had to check whether I tweeted this preposterous message or tooted it. Didn't know SunOS does it too!   @tubetime I agree with the sun engineers. Why is something with a 20MHz CPU and 1gb of spinning rust (probs not the original, much more likely to ve 500MB) even powered on in 2023?  @tubetime The best bit about this message is that I guarantee you there are still Sun4s in production somewhere.  @tubetime yours was the best account on Twitter, and now it’s the best account on Mastodon. Entertaining, and educational. Thank you for existing. @tubetime I've been putting off replacing the nvram in both my ipx machines :(  @tubetime 1994: Bah! That's preposterous! Reminds me of this comment in leapsecs.txt in libtai: "Note for parsers: Negative leap seconds will probably never happen, but the year 10000 will happen. Please don't contribute to the Y10K problem." @tubetime Does SunOS 4 still complain about a preposterous time after you've set the system clock to 2023? @tubetime Just seeing that terminal font made me think Solaris..I think it’s still being used in 11 or whatever they’re on now?   @tubetime That font brings back memories. I can still viscerally feel the slowness!  @tubetime This is probably the code triggering the warning: https://github.com/csrg/original-bsd/blob/master/sys/sparc/sparc/clock.c#L403-L408 It seems to be checking for dates too far in the past (before 1975, by the look) rather than too far in the future. I wonder if it is reading a zeroed sector on the disk where a unix timestamp would be in a running system?  @tubetime The condiments of the season and a preposterous new year! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv0hrQYbTXM&t=775s  @tubetime mhm, seems this SunOS won't run until timer overflow... Keep on and wish you best luck! @tubetime haha, I forget the name but there's at least one dos game that if you launch after a certain date it starts up with "YEAAHHHH STILL PLAYING (game) in 2023!!!"  @tubetime Wonder what the last non-preposterous date is according to SunOS? @tubetime well, SunOS isn't wrong. It is a bit of a preposterous time.  @tubetime this is absurd... 2023 is ludicrous time, not preposterous.  @tubetime yesterday I learned there is a game called outrun 2019 for the sega genesis @tubetime at what point does it start showing that kind of error? like what date does it start? 2020?  @tubetime It's fascinating - and probably a warning sign for people with long-lived systems - that systems increasingly won't reboot cleanly if they don't believe the date. @tubetime Whoever is running that box is putting a lot of effort into keeping it alive. That "ZULUSCSI" vendor reference refers to an elaborate SD card reader that is pretending to be a SCSI drive for host systems that antedates USB or any other kind of hotpluggable peripherals. @tubetime @ajcc A BSD friend of mine pointed out that this is ancient code and exists in some form to this day in OpenBSD and possibly other BSDs. https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/sys/kern/kern_time.c#L874  @tubetime That's SunOS 4 saying: "I'm too old for this S@#$!" OpenWindows! this seems to be running pretty well. SunOS 4.1.4 is a better match for this system than Solaris 2.5.1.  now if only i could figure out why it is not displaying in color... @jpm GOOD CALL. for some reason i thought Solaris 2.5 showed up in color but it surely did not. this is an MG2 analog framebuffer which only does 1-bit output. turns out i do not have a color framebuffer, just a plain old MG2 which is 1-bit. ok.  @tubetime It’s a proposed “Pacific Presidential Election Time” from 1989 that would extend daylight saving time on the west coast on presidential election years past the date of the election. https://github.com/moment/moment-timezone/issues/498 https://www.congress.gov/bill/101st-congress/house-bill/18?s=1&r=10  @tubetime I used an xterm font that started as a pixel-scrape of that console font, converted to an X10 font, then to an old-style X11 font, then upgraded to BDF... Eventually -sun-serif-medium-r-normal-* was released as a legitimate copy :-) @tubetime the sort of thing that I will say out loud in the lab, “and this is why I have gray hair!” 🤣  @tubetime as far as I remember this is also on the SPARCstation 2, SLC, ELC, IPC and IPX @tubetime |
@tubetime yeah so external drives used to ship with all the little jumpers off (ID=0) and if you plugged that into your Sun4 it wouldn't boot and then you'd call the service department ... so they wanted to make the main disk some other ID but everyone assumes the boot volume is sd0 ... so some evil genius came up with this plan.
The *good* external drives had a little pushbutton wheel thingy on the back to change their ID :-)