SCO bumbles along

I now, I know: don't kick a man when he's down. Poor SCO doesn't have much time left on this earth, and here I am complaining about their stuff.. oh well, I'm a horrible person and that's just the way it is.

A retail sales customer has a SCO 5.0.7 system that I maintain for them. Someone else does the POS app; I just do the silly SCO stuff. Anyway, the POS guy needed Samba for smething he wants to do, and it wasn't installed, so I went in to do that. Oh such joy: I really, really like putting up an ancient version of Samba on an oldish SCO box. Talk about gilding the lily..

So I ftp'd out to Skunkware (that probably won't last too much longer so why bother to href it and why would you want to go there anyway?) and downloaded the "latest" Samba. That would be Samba 3.0.14.. yeah.., well, I guess it could be worse.

Of course that wouldn't run on 5.0.7 MP3, I needed to also download SCO's MP5 patch, which at the moment is the latest and greatest patch available. Super patch, 265332 KB worth.. pretty much an entire OS replacement from the size of it and how long it took to install. And of course with so much replaced, it needed a reboot, which a retail store doesn't want to do mid day, so I left instructions that they needed to reboot the next morning and that I could finish up Samba by way of ssh.

Silly me.

Next morning I tried sshing in and found I could not. Oh well, probably that super patch broke something.. big deal, they'll reboot and it should be fine. I sent off an email to the customer asking if they had rebooted and got back an answer that said no, they hadn't, because the backup failed and the Guy In Charge would not reboot if he didn't have a good backup.. okey-dokey, I said, but if you don't reboot you probably never will have a good backup because I bet MP5 broke that too..

So a few more days went by, and Guy In Charge asked POS guy why the Samba thingy wasn't working, and he asked me, and I told him, and he asked if I'd go back on-site and "fix it". Sigh.. OK. So I did that, and sure enough confirmed that the backup was broken, and of course Samba wasn't going to work, and I was explaining this to Guy Not Quite In Charge, and he said "So? Reboot it - there's almost no one in the store right now, big deal". So we got everyone off and I did a quick reboot - total downtime probably four minutes at most.. but it was enough to get Guy In Charge to come flying into the room madder than a hornet because he Did Not Want the System Shut Down During the Day. Got that? Yessiree, I certainly did.. mutter, mutter..

Ok, backup still not working, but it was an older version of Microlite Edge, so maybe just not MP5 ready, so I d/led the most recent version I could without costing them and upgrade and that worked.. good. I did a "mkdev samba" and that worked, so I added the shares the POS guy wanted and tested them and that was happy. Now what the heck is with sshd which is still not working?

Ahhh.. on 5.0.7, sshd starts from /etc/rc2.d/S85tcp with a

/bin/su root -c '/usr/bin/sd ssh < /dev/console > /dev/console 2>&1'
 

Trying that myself, I found it was "sd" that was the problem: it didn't want to start sshd because there was no entry for it in /tcb/files/no_luid/cmdtable.

Well, there certainly was an entry before MP5. It said:

sshd:/etc/sshd:root
 

Which basically says that sd can start sshd if the person running sd has the "root" subsystem authorization. Without that in cmdtable, sd won't start it. So of course I just added it, and that fixed that.

Now here's the interesting thing: MP5 dates from 8/3/2006. Ayup - 15 months old as I write this. Do you think SCO knows about this error in cmdtable by now? You bet your bippee they know about it, but have they fixed it? No. Do they even have a TA (technical article) about it? No.

Yeah, yeah, I know: probably nobody left to write a TA - it's really amazing that the servers are still up.. but as I said, I'm not a nice person.

Anyway, I just thought I'd post that in case someone else runs into a problem starting sshd and notices the "This command does not have an entry in /tcb/files/no_luid/cmdtable" message. Just add the line "sshd:/etc/sshd:root" and all will be fine.. well, not really "fine" but you know what I mean..

Got something to add? Send me email.

4 comments

Have you tried Searching this site?

This is a Unix/Linux resource website. It contains technical articles about Unix, Linux and general computing related subjects, opinion, news, help files, how-to's, tutorials and more.

Contact us