Gregory's ServerSunOS 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.
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90 comments
  @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. @tubetime there’s the problem right there? Correct framebuffer driver isn’t loaded. Solaris that old is a bit before my time, but could be the installer doesn’t detect fb drivers and just installs bwtwo, or it could be the fb doesn’t have drivers for Solaris that old. turns out i do not have a color framebuffer, just a plain old MG2 which is 1-bit. ok. also what is really fun is to log into the computer remotely through telnet and then run the "play" command to play funny noises through the built-in speaker. back in the 90s we'd log into each other's workstations and play silly noises to surprise and amuse each other. there was even a script to automate that. and another script to automatically retaliate...  @tubetime We had a lab of Sun workstations (okay, only five of them, but still) at the university when I was a student and I learned you could cat /dev/audio into a file to record audio, and cat the resulting file back into /dev/audio to play it back. So of course we'd telnet into other workstations to play sounds on them. It got really stupid until someone snitched and /dev/audio was chmod 0600. @tubetime I remember when the sysadmins put security into the X sessions by default for new accounts. My friend, who had the older configuration, said “ah, that’s a bunch of nonsense, I don’t need that” He said that in a lab full of CS students. So we all remote logged into his computer and popped up Xeyes. And Xclock. And changed his background image. And started half a dozen sessions of Xsnow. “Okay you guys, very funny” So we intensified our efforts @tubetime eventually he was peering through the forest of windows to try to google the magic commands he needed to keep everyone from mucking with his X session One of the funniest 30 minutes of college Another friend of mine wrote a script to log into every workstation, change the background to spicy pink, and log out again. He’d run the script and set his own background color to pink, feign ignorance, and then surreptitiously look around to see how many people he got this time @tubetime when I was in college I would SSH into my roommate's Mac and use the "say" command to announce the wrong time and that programs that weren't running needed attention. I lost my access after that but it was worth it :) @tubetime Early at Sun we had a script to do this when people were assigning themselves their own IP address and said, "Oh look, .255 is available!" and then proceeded to wack the class C with broadcast crap.  @tubetime Working on CS homework with friends in a Sun lab in 1995, I remember one person finishing early and amusing himself with rsh and play... and then upgrading to a script to copy the .au file over to /tmp because trying to get multiple machines to play a sound at once would end up stuttering due to contention for the fileserver. He had gotten to the point of having random lab machine mooing at each other when we all called it a night. @tubetime We had something called “rplay” and it enabled a bit more automation - 5pm on Friday we did a broadcast rplay command to play a gong sound on _all_ the workstations to announce Friday drinks! @tubetime Yup. And when you forgot to check who was actually logged in and did that to your boss instead of the coworker who normally used that machine….  On a network of NeXT machines, recording someone’s own conversation using their own machine and playing it back on their own machine was entertaining. All of a sudden something they’d just said would come out of it.  @tubetime for sun workstations tcpdump equivalent (snoop) had a flag to play a little noise for each matched packet. I had been known to run that on servers people kept in their office.  @tubetime hmm.... I remember that the first release of windows NT had, as a default, snmp enabled amd both read and write set to public. (and some wonder, why Microsoft has a bad name when it comes to security). @tubetime OpenLook has such nice light aesthetics, kind of playful even, especially compared to the visual sledgehammer that is Motif.  @tubetime @tubetime I really liked OpenWindows, way back when. We used a package called DevGuide for UI prototyping.  @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 thanks for that wiki hole and a very entertaining 15 minutes of my life! @tubetime A proposed change that never materialized. It was removed from the timezone database again in 2017 after never coming into use. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=815200 has some background info.  @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 SunOS 4 is my all-time favorite OS, so if forced to choose, I would choose SunOS over 2023. I'd like to reserve the right to change my mind of 2023 gets better.  @tubetime I seem to remember from about 1998 onwards, Sun were all "only Solaris gets Y2K stuff". As someone who had to dedicate 1/6 of his team to Y2K compliance for 18 months in a Solaris shop ... eesh. @tubetime @happystardiaz Hah, when I was messing with the Sun 68k emulator I broke the real time clock chip emulation because I misunderstood the documentation and SunOS said that the Real time clock had gone insane 😀 @tubetime Bet there is a comment in the code "We cannot dream of still being around then" @tubetime I recently did some work on an ancient SCO server that a company was running their ENTIRE BUSINESS on! They had files in the log from at least 1998...  @tubetime  @tubetime that warning would have been useful 18 months ago. 2023 sucked.    @tubetime well. It's not like the OS is wrong about that |
@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!
Thank you for the swizzle table, I'm sure I'll lose it but it's useful to me anyway.