Do You Know SCO?

Thu Oct 9 14:52:48 PDT 2003

Do you know SCO?

Santa Cruz Operations' UNIX, that is?

I don't know the version of SCO; but I know someone, who has a customer, 
whose SCO installation had a hard drive die. They need help.

It would be fair to charge $80 an hour - but it would also be fair to 
say that you would be expected to provide expertise, in exchange for the 
privilege of charging money, for sitting on your butt, restoring their data.

Before I can provide interested parties with the contact information, 
you must convince -me- that you know more than I do about this problem 
... so that I can hand it off to you, in good faith.

Here's the history.

I was brought in to diagnose the problem; hardware or software? After 
some poking around, I found SCO's equivalent of /usr/adm/messages, and 
in it, hard error messages naming a device and the bad blocks. I 
extracted the device name, translated the UNIX nomenclature into a SCSI 
device for the benefit of the service provider, and also provided a list 
of bad blocks.

Several weeks later, I was called and asked to come down ASAP; the 
service provider was returning the computer to the customer, the drive 
had been swapped, but it wasn't booting with the new drive, only when 
they put the old drive in. He was hoping I could help.

The old drive was a once-widely recognized 9 GB SCSI of, I'd guess, late 
1990s vintage. He was unable to replace it, he said, and so had 
installed a larger 30 GB drive, but it didn't work.

Although I won't go into the physical hardware here, it's not unlikely 
that there was a mismatch in the SCSI controller, cable, and drive; I 
have recommended that he get an identical drive simply because although 
it is very intellectually satisfying to puzzle out what is not working, 
it also takes many hours, is rarely cost-effective, and requires 
technicians with at least a two-year degree from a junior college in 
electronics or computer hardware, which, I judge, may be lacking here 
(and for this reason, diplomacy is required, as well as technical 
expertise).

To make matters worse, throughout this sequence of events he had 
insisted that Norton Ghost would be sufficient unto all his 
requirements. Having recently dealt with a Linux server that had been 
Ghosted (and it was one un-bootable, un-filesystem-checkable piece of 
silicon, too), I had my doubts; I know too much about how filesystems 
and hard drives and bad block mapping works to assume that you can buy a 
one-size-fits-all solution, shrinkwrapped, at CompUSA.

But I have not said so explicitly; I hate to argue with a customer. 
(Again, diplomacy is indicated.)

My intuition is that there are a combination of problems here; a 
hardware mismatch combined with an operating system gotcha.

(I'm not against working on this directly, if there's someone out there 
who wants to answer questions and permit me to do the dirty work in 
exchange for a small honorarium for their wisdom and guidance, by the 
way, if they're reading this, are knowledgeable, but are feeling 
undermotivated ... contact me.)

My intuition is that the solution involves negotiating the hardware 
mismatch ... reconciling the operating system gotcha ... building a new 
filesystem ... and reloading the data from backups, made either 
immediately before the disk is exchanged, or from a stack of tapes whose 
contents and dates of creation would probably need to be audited and 
verified beforehand (IE, more hours of work).

If you are reading this, have detailed expertise with SCO, and can 
provide objective references to materials which corroborate your 
diagnosis, analysis, or terminology (IE, URLs), I'd like to discuss 
either leveraging off of your expertise, or handing this off to you, 
entirely, so that the customer - poor wretches, they are underpaid, 
overeducated financial and statistical analysts trapped in a world of 
high finance but receiving only crumbs for their economic labors ... 
they have more in common with systems administrators then they do with 
financiers - can have their computer back, working reliably, their faith 
in UNIX (dare I say it?) restore(8)'d.

(-:

Thanks in advance,

-- richard

Richard Childers / Senor Engineer
Daemonized Networking Systems
https://www.daemonized.com
(415) 759-5571