Dealing with a legacy unix box.

Vince · 8 Nov 2012 at 12:32

Hi All,

I work with a company where we are now fully virtualised onto a hp6300 eva along with an older storage works eva. As it stands all of our systems are in VMware ESXI 5 and running well, this is all but one server.

The server in question is a legacy unix box, the box was installed in 1990 and is still alive, just, however today one of the power supplies failed which took the box down. I have managed to revive it but am now looking at possible ways to get it off of the hardware and into either a unix VM on the eva or alternatively I would just like to export the database off of the machine into SQL.

The question I guess is what are my options... I could just let the thing die which is what the company is prepared to do but having some kind of fresh backup of the system/database that can be bought up in an emergency is the preferred option.

Is there some kind of simple wm converter? The system is almost as old as me so anything crazy technical and I may need some hand holding as my exposure to unix is not massive.

Any thoughts wold be appreciated.

Cheers.

Vince · 8 Nov 2012 at 13:44

I was thinking the same, just hoping that there is somebody out there who has done this already.

I guess I will hold out a bit longer and see if anybody has dedicated any time to this. I can't see it being all that difficult and converter seems to support it but I just don't know how good a job it will do.

Vince · 8 Nov 2012 at 16:03

When she boots she tells me that she is 386 compatible hardware. You guys appear to have confirmed my suspicions that it just isn't worth the pain that migrating it is likely to cause.

Time to get the business used to the idea of life without an old school system.

Vince · 9 Nov 2012 at 10:40

OS is Unix Ware 2.1 - I have had a chat with the partners here today and we are just going to let this run until it dies a death. The accounts system was replaced 6 years ago and although there are paper based records the old unix based system is still used to reference certain things.

To be honest there doesn't seem to be any appetite (now its running again) to do anything with it. I guess ill support it the best I can while its alive and get the accounts department used to using paper files for retrieving from the archive. I'm still investigating a way of exporting data into something like sql/reporting services but that's going to take a while.