Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by chrissnell 2911 days ago
I had a SGI Indy as my desktop machine in the mid-90s. It was a really awesome system at the time and I still miss it. A couple of random things that I remember:

- The 'lp' account (for the printing system) was not protected by a password on IRIX installs for the longest time. You could telnet in and exploit df(1) [1] and you'd have root. I obtained shells on a number of SGIs around the 'net in this manner back in the day. Good times!

- The author mentioned not being able to run EZSetup over an X11 session. As I recall, many of the graphical system utilities SGI's proprietary framework, which used some proprietary extensions that would not render over vanilla X11. The only way you could run them was from another SGI (using X11 forwarding) or from the local console. I'll bet this is why EZSetup never ran for you.

So much fun. I'm alllllmost tempted to go looking for an Indy on eBay. :)

[1] https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/19274/