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Back in my sysadmin days we had an IT zoo to look after. And I mean it... Linux side was allright, but unix.... Most unices were no longer supported. Some of their vendors' companies were already long gone.

There was a distant corner in our estate known to like 2 people only, both have left the company long ago. And one server in that corner went down. It took 2 days to find any info about the device. And connecting to it looked like:

1 ssh to a jumpbox #1
2 ssh to a jumpbox #2
3 ssh to a dmz jumpbox
4 ssh to an aix workload
5 fire up a vnc server
6 open up a vnc client on my workstation, connect to than vnc server [forgot to mention, all ssh connections had to forward a vnc port to my pc]
7 in vnc viewer, open up a terminal
8 ssh to hp-uxes' jumpbox
9 ssh to the problematic hp-ux

.....

Comments
  • 5
    Haha lol.

    Why is this post not ++ed like a hundred times?
  • 2
    ++ for “unices”
  • 0
    Holy shit
  • 1
    Ah, and I suppose "ProxyCommand + LocalForward" just happened to fail you, poor soul? Darn, I can feel the pain & anger.
  • 1
    @DrGlitch I used local forward to get vpn port. Proxy command wouldn't make it all the way to the end point. I might be missing a step in this list, because I am certain a vnc connection was mandatory in the chain. There was no way around it [or was not worth wasting even more time].

    This happened ~5 years ago, so pardon me if I left something out :)
  • 1
    @DrGlitch oh, yeah. And some hops could only be made using a ssh wrapper [security and auditing reasons]. So ssh functionality was _very_ limted.

    We are talking about machines with first versions of rsh :)
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