There was a trick I saw once, where you could use the editing commands in openboot, plus the fact that it could read UFS volumes, to find the offset of the root

There was a trick I saw once, where you could use the editing commands in openboot, plus the fact that it could read UFS volumes, to find the offset of the root entry in the on-disk shadow file and zero or change it if you'd lost the password. When I was in school, the astronomy dept. used a remote telescope in Wyoming. I guess there was dial-up to send commands to open the dome if the weather looked nice, to send coordinates to aim the scope, and to set exposure times for the CCD. The connectivity wasn't enough to download lots of data, so there was a data collection box; a 16mhz Sun IPC workstation in the "lunchbox" form factor, roughly 10"x10"x5". Someone had written a program in OpenFirmware Forth to read data off of whatever storage was on the scope via the IPC's serial port, and write it to the internal SCSI drive. After every observing run, a collaborator would put the IPC in a backpack and jog it up the mountain, so it could be plugged into a scope & terminal, and run the collector code to pull the data. A friend's first real job was maintaining that forth code; he still has nightmares about it. Having system firmware that is that flexible is pretty nice, but really hard to write marketing copy for.