drawing of a Sun workstation

Useful tools for Sun workstations and Solaris

This page is no longer being maintained. It is still here in case it might be useful to somebody, but many of the links are broken, much of the software obsolete, and it is generally in a state of disrepair.

change-sun-hostid is a collection of C programs and scripts for systems administrators which allow one to change the real or apparent hostid of a Sun workstation. In addition there is support for changing the hostid of a PC running Solaris 2.5. This public domain software is intended for short-term use in emergency situations, where the hostid needs to be spoofed because a computer system goes down and some of the applications must be moved to a different server immediately, i.e. without waiting for the vendor to supply new keys. Software vendors rarely supply keys outside of business hours, and they often take several hours or days to provide new keys in the case of server failure. I'm working on a release for Solaris 7, most of the programs in 1.7.4 about will work on 32 bit Solaris 7 systems. Here is a version of hid2 for 64-bit Solaris 7 systems Thanks to Dale Higgs for compiling this using the new Workshop 64-bit compiler.

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Available as of July 1997: some unsupported notes on changing the system ID on IRIX machines.

picture of the NVRAM chip in an IPXThe Sun NVRAM/hostid FAQ answers frequently asked questions on comp.sys.sun.hardware and comp.sys.sun.admin about the hostid and NVRAM/IDPROM chips on Sun workstations. These chips often fail, and this FAQ will tell you how to repair your workstation for about US$20. As a side-effect, this document also tells how to change the hostid and default ethernet address of a Sun workstation. A plain text version is available for folks who find the HTML version inconvenient.

Unstrip is a program that allows one to recover some symbolic information from stripped dynamically linked binaries under Solaris 2.4-2.6. This is occasionally useful for reverse engineering and system debugging (here's an example). Unstrip for Sun OS 4.1.x by Paul Kranenburg is also available.

VIF by Steinar.Haug@nethelp.no is a kernel loadable module which will allow a Sun running Sun OS 4.1.x to have multiple loopback interfaces with different IP addresses. With the appropriate routes, one can effectively serve multiple IP addresses. This can be used with change-sun-hostid to make some applications running on a machine believe they are running on a system with a different hostname and IP address.

red.c allows one to generate ICMP host redirects from arbitrary source addresses. This is useful for testing whether your network is vunerable to disruption by ICMP redirects and to demonstrate to folks why it is essential to either block these at routers or configure hosts so that ICMP redirects are ignored. It should work on Solaris 2.5 and 4.4BSD based systems.

valknútr

Interesting Sun and UNIX related links

acorn - list bulletSCSI Zip Drives on Solaris

acorn - list bulletTools for Managing/Delivering/Reading Email

Þórshamarsupport the right to use cryptography without backdoors







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This page is maintained by Mark Henderson



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