Re: About Gilmore's letter on IBM&Intel push copy protection into ordinary disk drives
In message <20001224150321.A24733@die.com>, Dave Emery writes:
A note on this note - I was told back in that era by Sun field service people that the standard thing to do when a motherboard failed was to swap the ID prom from the old motherboard onto the new one, thus avoiding the whole license conversion problem in the first place (but of course also doing wonders for the ability to track specific pieces of hardware and document ECO levels and the like, since a significant number of motherboards had swapped ID proms in which all the other information in the prom didn't match the actual board).
"Standard"? It was more than that; it was the *right* thing to do. On a diskless workstation, there was no other identity to the machine; if you didn't swap the ID prom -- which was used for the low-order 24 bits of the Ethernet address -- your machine wouldn't receive the proper boot image, etc. Add to that the number of machines in the mid-to-late 80's that didn't have ARP, and it was utterly necessary. --Steve Bellovin
At 04:10 PM 12/24/00 -0500, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
"Standard"? It was more than that; it was the *right* thing to do. On a diskless workstation, there was no other identity to the machine; if you didn't swap the ID prom -- which was used for the low-order 24 bits of the Ethernet address -- your machine wouldn't receive the proper boot image, etc. Add to that the number of machines in the mid-to-late 80's that didn't have ARP, and it was utterly necessary.
But it was only the right thing to do if your the spare machine was roughly identical to the dead machine. Fortunately, Sun operating systems are pretty good at guessing hardware, due to S-Bus self-identification and the relative consistency of hardware. With diskful machines, you sometimes had to worry about whether the spare machine had as much disk as the original, though diskless machines didn't have that problem. Sometimes you'd get into trouble because the spare machine had a wimpier graphics board than the dead machine, and the graphics configs might be stored in the copy of the program that was on the file server, but usually you were ok. You could also get into trouble if Box A (now deceased) had Program A, and Box B had Program B, so you couldn't move the prom from A into B without making it unable to run Program B. But of course, if you've got a $20,000 chip-design program, and $5000 Sun workstations, it's more cost-effective to keep spare workstations around than spare program licenses, and _much_ more cost-effective to keep spare disk drives. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
In message <20001224150321.A24733@die.com>, Dave Emery writes:
A note on this note - I was told back in that era by Sun field service people that the standard thing to do when a motherboard failed was to swap the ID prom from the old motherboard onto the new one, thus avoiding the whole license conversion problem in the first place (but of course also doing wonders for the ability to track specific pieces of hardware and document ECO levels and the like, since a significant number of motherboards had swapped ID proms in which all the other information in the prom didn't match the actual board).
"Standard"? It was more than that; it was the *right* thing to do. On a diskless workstation, there was no other identity to the machine; if you didn't swap the ID prom -- which was used for the low-order 24 bits of the Ethernet address -- your machine wouldn't receive the proper boot image, etc. Add to that the number of machines in the mid-to-late 80's that didn't have ARP, and it was utterly necessary.
--Steve Bellovin
Same was true of DEC workstations. The service tech would switch the proms. The board had it's own serial number label on the board so they could still keep track of it.
At 04:04 PM 12/25/00 -0600, Neil Johnson wrote:
Same was true of DEC workstations. The service tech would switch the proms. The board had it's own serial number label on the board so they could still keep track of it.
As opposed to DEC VAXen, where the tech would reformat the disks, whether they needed them or not, and occasionally replace the bad disk controller with another bad disk controller :-) Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
participants (3)
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Bill Stewart -
Neil Johnson -
Steven M. Bellovin