OT: SCO Release 5 reboots upon printing from filePro

[Brian K. White]

On 1/22/2014 11:42 AM, fpgroups . wrote:
> Well, I opened server and the memory it uses are SD-RAM and none of my
> other PCs have identical chips.
>
> In the end, I took the HD and the Network card out of dead server /
> installed them in another PC and all is well  ;-)
>
> I never thought one could simply do that since OS install is based on MB
> architecture and what not ... I am not upset since my SCO box is working
> and I have successfully printed from within my filePro application.
>
> Proceeding to get a clean backup!
>
> Thank you all for your assistance.

... or you could do that ;)

Yes if the old machine used generic enough IDE drive controller 
hardware, and the new machine is old enough to be pretty similar to the 
old one, then it makes it easier to transplant the drive. Since you 
pulled the network card you pretty much got the only other thing that 
was likely to break. IDE, parallel, and serial ports are all the same, 
if the new machine is actually old enough to even HAVE parallel or 
serial ports at all.

I am a little surprised you didn't have to reconfigure the network card 
in sco due to it getting a different IRQ on the new board but sometimes 
you get lucky that way. You lucked out with usb and acpi features on the 
new board not tripping up the kernel too.

Your experience is a textbook example and poster child for why you 
should always try to use generic least-common-denominator options 
wherever possible. Open standards, open source software, generic 
hardware, etc.

If you had some special wizbang awesome super duper cool magic hard 
drive controller, or worse a server with that stuff all built-in, you'd 
most likely be screwed. Can't buy that server anymore, can't pull the 
special drive controller out to put in new machine, can't hack the drive 
image to install new different drivers for different hardware without 
having the original system working... There are ways to do such a 
migration, by booting a special kernel that lets you load drivers 
manually at boot time, but it's freaking arcane and often doesn't 
actually work, and pretty much requires a real 3.5" floppy drive, not a 
usb one but a real one, which motherboards don't even have a plug for 
anymore sometimes. It's theoretically possible to do it with a usb drive 
on 5.0.7 (may or may not be possible on 5.0.6) but it's so poorly 
documented that I've never seen clear instructions and never managed to 
do it.

Your old machine was KISS, and therefor you didn't have any problems 
years later.

-- 
bkw