Lost files...

[mix-hyenataur.livejournal.com]

It's nice to walk home and find fully functional RAID boxes and servers in the dumpster behind a financial building that just got new servers a half year ago.

It's very nice.

*takes them home*

Comments

[zzyzx.livejournal.com]

Have any extras? :P

Score!

[irishmasms.livejournal.com]

Did you strat the data recovery/forensics on those drives yet? ;)

Re: Score!

[mix-hyenataur.livejournal.com]

i guess they are for MAC, and i'm soley a pc user, so they show up as RAW. Any advice/programs?

Re: Score!

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

I'd be doubting that if they didn't come out of Xserves or the like. You can try running Ontrack on them or a partition recovery program such as Partition Table Doctor or Advanced Partition Recovery and see what that nets.

Re: Score!

[jakari.livejournal.com]

What do the servers boot up with, if at all?

The world is not just PC or Mac. A dozen different Unix/Linux/BSD variants, even AS/400, VMS, or a mainframe OS are possible if it's coming from a bank/brokerage/clearinghouse or the like. We run all sorts of systems.

If they're x86 servers and don't boot on their own, get yourself an Ubuntu Linux live-CD - it's the most likely to be able to figure out what is/was on them.

Then again, one would hope that they ran some sort of disk-wipe utility on them, leaving you with nothing, which is probably for the best.

Dumpster diving = awesome, until your electric bill comes.

Re: Score!

[ptomblin-lj.livejournal.com]

When I'm throwing machines out, I like to take the disks, wipe them, and install the wrong OS on them. So if it's an Wintel machine I'll throw them in a PowerPC Mac and install Mac OS X on them before putting them back. If it's a Mac, I'll take the drives out and install whatever (non-Mac) Linux distro I happen to have handy. It was better when I had a DEC Alpha and a SPARCStation Classic around, just to make the selection of wrong OSes even better.

Re: Score!

[irishmasms.livejournal.com]

There are some forensics tools out there, even a Open Source Forensics bootable distro; hell if I can recall them at the moment. a GTFG should find what you are looking for.

[canray.livejournal.com]

*Evil Grin*

[kenbrody.livejournal.com]

You'd like to think that these are the old servers, having finally been phased out as they rolled in and tested the new ones they got 6 months ago. Of course, then reality sinks in.

[mashiroikaze.livejournal.com]

It says to me that:
1 - Their internal support is contracted and skimming the profits on the price of new servers; and/or,
2 - Their internal support works late and is going to be sorely disappointed when the toys they thought they had snuck out via the dumpster were picked up by someone else.

[hiroe.livejournal.com]

I once rescued a pair of Apollo 3550 unix servers from the dumpster.

[adamjaskie.livejournal.com]

I rescued an Ultra 80 from the.. *ahem* 'dumpster staging area'.

4x 450MHz UltraSPARC II processors, 4MB cache each
4GB RAM
2x Elite3d m3 UPA framebuffers

[hiroe.livejournal.com]

I can't find my notes on what specifically was inside the boxen, but i do recall that each had some 400mb ram, and a 400mb monster HD. The mobos also had a mac expansion slot of some kind?

On bootup, they both tried to load x-win via the token-ring network.


Couldn't give them away, so i eventually ended up cracking the HDs open and pulling the platters out, to hang from things and look shiny.

[ihateemo.livejournal.com]

On bootup, they both tried to load x-win via the token-ring network.

Har!

[http://users.livejournal.com/hub_/]

very nice.

[jecook]

Heh. Definatly not my current company, and not the one before it.

(Current co. has a proper asset disposal policy, and the one before would have put the aged machines back into service. Dumpster diving there would have yielded actual broken machines, wiped drives w/ odd looking dents in them, and stripped carcasses...)

[jecook]

And by Dents, I mean these types of dents. ::snicker::