[Discuss] Any NeXTperts out there?

[kkeville at mit.edu (Kurt L Keville)]

Well, I will nmap those Apple IP addresses... Apple has a full class A address space I think, so this may take awhile. It has been a long time... not sure what port I am looking for... does NIS even work these days??


________________________________
From: Neil Donahue <nmd at andrew.cmu.edu>
Sent: Monday, May 9, 2022 2:08 PM
To: Kurt L Keville
Cc: discuss at lists.blu.org; discuss at blu.org
Subject: Re: Any NeXTperts out there?

Wow. As far as I can tell, Simson Garfinkel is now working at DHS or maybe the Census Bureau. If there is anybody who I would think might actually remember how to do this it would be him. Second bet is Andy Stone.


Neil M. Donahue, Lord University Professor of Chemistry
  Departments of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering,
  Engineering and Public Policy, and
  Center for Atmospheric Particle Studies
Director
  Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education
  and Research
Doherty Hall 2116
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA  15213
(412) 268-4415




On May 9, 2022, at 13:39 , Kurt L Keville <kkeville at mit.edu<mailto:kkeville at mit.edu>> wrote:

So I finally decided to donate a NeXT Machine to the Computer Museum... I think the last time this was booted was 20 years ago, but even if it was, it did not find an ntp server back then according to the syslog...

I have done everything that
NeXTAnswer 2152 Restoring Root Password
tells me to do... and it appears to be sticking after I look at /etc/passwd but it does not work at the GUI prompt.

I suspect this has something to do with it looking for, and then failing to find, yellowpages. I seem to remember something about that. I am not particularly married to any content on the drive so I think I could do something drastic if need be... although I think I can just set it to boot bypassing the password prompt, yes?

I might also see if I can find a place outside of MIT that will issue it a routable IP address and see if any of the server addresses it is trying to hit are still alive. That is just crazy enough that Apple might still have those addresses. Not everyone is selling their address space off to Amazon.