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reverse-engineering

First look at the Silicon Graphics Indy boot process

Posted May 19, 2018 under

I’ve been fascinated by Silicon Graphics hardware for a very long time. Growing up, I had owned or at least had good access to a decent number of Silicon Graphics machines from the Indy up to the Octane series. I loved the industrial design of the hardware itself, as well as how capable and bulletproof they seemed.

SGI Irix

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Bringing back Blobbo

Posted Jan 7, 2017 under
I spent a lot of my childhood playing games, of all sorts. I have lots of fond memories playing multiplayer Doom back in the early 90’s with my dad, computers tenuously linked over null modem cable. One of the more obscure games I enjoyed was Blobbo, a puzzle game released for classic Mac systems. Blobbo was released as shareware, with the option of buying the full version of the game. The full version had a level editor, which I very much wanted. Read more

Reverse Engineering Draytek Vigor3300 Firmware

Posted Mar 17, 2013 under

At my work, I occasionally end up with pieces of equipment that were once deployed at customer sites or in our own production datacenter that are no longer required. On this occasion, one of our clients replaced their Draytek Vigor3300 router with something else, and decided they didn’t care what happened to the deprecated device.

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Scraping the surface - Cisco 7970G Hardware

Posted Jun 13, 2009 under

The Cisco 7970 is a black box piece of hardware and as such there is very little information about it on the internet. Cisco pretend it’s a closed appliance and as such go out of their way to prevent people for using the in a more flexible manner.

As of late I’ve been doing quite a bit of Cisco phone trickery. I’ve gotten a network of Cisco phones working with Asterisk and I’ve been building up sleek looking XML services for the 797x models. What I really want to do, though, is delve a little deeper into the spirit of hardware hacking and see if I can properly customise the phone beyond what is possible with configuration files.

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