Sunday, June 11, 2017

Restoring Ultra 5 NV ram info


This set of notes resets a serial into a Sun ultra 5 after power on, or replacement


Note that the BIOS battery in this unit has expired (the system was manufactured 17 years ago after all).  When you initially power on the system, you will need to program the PROM serial number and manually boot the system.  The procedure to program the PROM serial number follows:

1.) Invalidate the PROM XOR checksum:
57 f mkp <enter>
2.) Program the PROM's Serial number:
8 0 20 2b 59 d2 2b59d2 mkpl <enter> <ctrl-d> <ctrl-r>
3.) Reset the system so that the system detects a proper serial number during POST:
reset <enter>
4.) Boot internal hard drive:
boot disk <enter>

*If you need to stop the system, press <stop-a> to get to the "OK>" prompt.
 
 

Friday, June 9, 2017

Downgrading php from 7.0 to 5.0


Php7 is installed by default on Ubuntu 16.04. 

The copy of gregarius, an RSS aggregator / reader uses php revision greater than 4.  Many of the mysql php core functions, and string editing is needlessly mangled in 7.0, and editing and updating the gregarius package is a very large task.

It is easier to downgrade the php for now than editing gregarius.  FWIW gregarius is pretty much dead in support after 2006, very old, which is sad since it is a nice stable tool.

it requires mysql, but luckily the downgraded php 5 works along with the mysql extensions.

Procedure snarfed from another blog to remove php 7 and install 5.6 from another repository, ondrej.

Remove all the stock php packages
List installed php packages with dpkg -l | grep php| awk '{print $2}' |tr "\n" " " then remove unneeded packages with sudo aptitude purge your_packages_here or if you want to directly remove them all use :
sudo apt-get purge `dpkg -l | grep php| awk '{print $2}' |tr "\n" " "`
Add the PPA
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
If you get add-apt-repository: command not found run the following command first :
sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
Install your PHP Version
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install php5.6
You can install php5.6 modules too for example
sudo apt-get install php5.6-mbstring php5.6-mcrypt php5.6-mysql php5.6-xml
Verify your version
If you have installed php5.6-cli
sudo php -v
If you don't have php5.6-cli, put this on a .php file
<?php 
      //outputs php configuration info
      phpinfo(); 
?>

restarting apache

dpkg-reconfigure phpmyadmin

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