On 8/29/23 9:49 PM, Tom Brennan wrote:
Just to be clear, I'm not talking about doing anything to the HMC that
isn't sanctioned by IBM.
I assumed as much.
And pardon me if you already know this, but HMC's are really locked
down.
Well ... IBM took a reasonable pass at making the older HMCs that I've
worked on recently take a little bit of effort to get in and do things.
For example, no command line access even when standing at the machine.
I was poking around on $WORK's older HMCs three weeks ago and, as a well
seasoned Linux administrator, found it not quite trivial to get into the
underlying Linux OS and do whatever I wanted to.
I'll just say that if you're familiar with how Linux boots and what
different things do, it's one transient non-persistent edit away from
dropping you at a root shell prompt where you can make any change that
you want to on the system.
Obviously this is not sanctioned by IBM.
I'm dealing with hardware that is so far out of support that it's not
even funny.
But under the hood, it's Linux that looks STRIKINGLY like a heavily
modified Red Hat / CentOS 6.x generation with all visible branding removed.
I've since had someone tell me that there is a method to get a normal
shell on an HMC. I speculate it's reminiscent of padmin on VIOS where
you log in for vtmenu and then do something not well documented.
A quick web search reveals that there is a root account with a less well
known password.
When you're willing to do unsupported things on hardware that isn't
capable of being supported, you can do some amazing things if you want
to. }:-)
PSA, the HMC that I looked at used file system labels to identify which
file system was to be mounted where. So ... which file system with the
label of "/" is mounted when there are two of them? }:-)
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
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