[ale] Virtualizing SCO OpenServer 5.x

Wed Apr 16 09:49:00 EDT 2014

Everyone, thanks for all the replies.  I suppose I should give a little more background...

I can't name the client, but this is a "your tax dollars at work" situation...a small department inside of a bigger one.  The role that this server plays is declining in importance, but it needs to stay around for a few more years.
The application is one that was written in-house a couple of decades ago.  It is all in COBOL, and very WTF filled... for example, they have several Okidata dot matrix printers for printing forms.  There is a wide format one for some sort of report, one for regular sized reports, one for checks, one for some other sort of form...etc...  they all have Axis print servers attached, and are configured as print queues on the server.  From the best I can tell, the printer names are hard coded into the application.  (Go to a screen, do some action, it prints something to the appropriate printer...etc...).  Also, on top of the Unix password, has an application password...  it gets that one by taking the first and last letter of the three letter username.   So...  if you ssh into the server as "abc", once you have typed in your Unix password, the app runs from your .profile, and prompts for a login...  you enter a username of "abc" and a password of "ac" to enter the app.  If the username is over three characters it won't work.  I'm sure that wqs a good idea to someone at the time...:)  Luckily, this thing is on a private subnet.
They found a company that had a commercial application that does what this one does (Windows based)...the company was even working with them to move their data into the new app....then that company decided to ax that product, and left them mid-migration with nothing to show.   As I said, it is something that is declining in need...
I got an e-mail from them that they found everything...the SCO licenses, possibly the COBOL software licenses, and everything that came with the implementation......with originals in a safe, and multiple copies.  That's something you don't get from a client very often.
Anyway, I've also done a good bit of searching around, and based on what I found, and the comments here, VMware is going to be my best hope of getting anything to work.  Apparently any option is going to require removing the driver it is using for the Dell SCSI controller and relinking the kernel.
I'm going to give it a try...the worst I can do is was a lot of time.  The biggest obstacle I see is that most of the people who are doing it successfully are using 5.0.6 or 5.0.7....and from what I can tell, they are running 5.0.0

Anyway, this may be a learning experience that results in buying another 2600 off of Ebay :D
Allen B.

--
Allen Beddingfield
Systems Engineer
The University of Alabama
________________________________
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [ale-bounces at ale.org] on behalf of Neal Rhodes [neal at mnopltd.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2014 11:17 PM
To: mhw at WittsEnd.com; Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] Virtualizing SCO OpenServer 5.x

Mike probably has gotten farther with virtualization of SCO than I have.

First off, if you didn't have the very lastest final version of SCO, it didn't have hardware support for so much of what we now take for granted.    IDE, USB.    And does anyone remember how painful it was to recompile the kernel to add support for additional drivers?   I recall trying to install on maybe 5.0.4 and it was a flop.

Before you go down that road of trying to virtualize, I'd ask precisely WHY they cannot migrate to Linux.   I have had some good results migrating Business Basic applications and DBs intact to Linux systems from SCO.   It is a bit easier to convince the client to make this jump when their SCO hardware fries and all they have is a backup tape.    Are they truly on some dead-end language that cannot migrate?

Regarding transfer, I hate to give away my age, but what about hanging any desktop on a serial port and using Kermit?  Or UUCP?  Yes, it will take a while to transfer at 38400, but what's time to a pig?

Neal

On Tue, 2014-04-15 at 20:13 -0400, Michael H. Warfield wrote:

On Tue, 2014-04-15 at 19:17 -0400, Jim Lynch wrote:
> On 04/15/2014 03:21 PM, Beddingfield, Allen wrote:
> > I don't think there is enough free disk space on the original system to make that backup
> I don't have any SCO experience, but can you attach (and use) a USB
> harddrive?

Oh, I remember that too.  Yes and no.

Yes, you can (maybe) after getting the appropriate drivers enabled and
recompile the kernel with that.  I think I remember doing that.  Painful
experience.  I think I remember I gave up on the effort but that was a
long time ago.

No, in that SCO is not going to understand any ext* file system, Linux
is not (I don't think) understand that antiquated sv5* file system, and
VFAT, NTFS, or other lowest common denominator isn't going to cut it
because of file attributes (which is why I probably gave up).

You could do a tar backup to it (again - you gotta enable those drivers
and rebuild the kernel) on a VFAT file system (subject to file length
limits on VFAT) and then extract them.  I don't think I ever tried using
NTFS with SCO.

Neil Rhodes might have better advice.  He's also done work on SCO.  I
put this behind me over a decade ago.

> Jim

Regards,
Mike
_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org<mailto:Ale at ale.org>
http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo