Ok I found it… I actually went to the ‘rescued’ hardware system, and after some skullduggery, rebooted for the first time in YEARS! Found a spare switch, and a Pi 3 with (luckily) an older OS still on it - Version “8 (jessie)”, plugged it all up and crossed fingers…
- it booted
- the version of SSH on the Pi could connect to it (very old key exchange & cipher values)
- I still had the username and password
Here is a photo of the system
On the left is an Advantek Small computer system, with 32M of RAM and 32M of Flash disk, 3 ethernet ports, 2 serial ports, a PS2 kbd/mouse connector and a VGA output.
On the right is the main PSU and the Wavecom SMS modem. (its’ wallwart psu was buried in the rack somewhere behind the panel). The antenna connected just above the white tape next to the modem - the tape was to make the flashing of the modem LED visible.
The OS was a compressed cutdown version of FreeBSD 4.11, that uncompressed, and booted up from the root of the flash drive, created two in-memory ‘disks’ for the /var and /dev directories, and loaded the configurations from a read-only flashdisk /config directory into a working ramdisk directory.
The monitoring daemon scripts were then started, and checked the UPS statuses, the other temperature monitors in a few places and ran a regular ping cycle to check / report on network items presence (or not). Network switches and the UPS’s were setup to generate SNMP trap messages on reboots, link outages, over temp etc. Appropriate reports were sent by SMS to the support team.
Additional scripts allowed for displaying / updating UPS status and alarm trigger points. These could be run from an attached keyboard and monitor, OR from a laptop on the second network.
If the configs were changed, they were re-saved to the R/O config directory by the shutdown script.
And yes the label says “2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games”, and also “2006 Asian Games (in Doha, Qatar)”. This system was used to monitor the operation of the arena and stage lighting systems at those international events. (FYI - LX is theatre shorthand for “Lighting” )
If anyone is interested, I will put the scripts up on a Drive somewhere…
cheers
Murray
