Study, migration and update of old systems, hardware and software.

Reverse documentation of (old or not) systems. (can sometimes be described as a kind of IT archaeology)

Adapt C code, Perl and Shell scripts.

A research system was controlled by an Apple Xserve 1.1 whose single hard drive start to fail.

It was possible to retrieve and backup the data.

We were able to find Xserve 3.1, the extract graphics card and sevral harddrives.

This allowed us to install a slightly newer OS version, whith software RAID1 included, which we seted up with a spare disk.

Monitoring was also added, to watch the RAID status and disj space.

And the project was able to go forward.

A small software, converting raw binary data to ascii format, was wroted and shared among researchers from sevral units, transforming the data format from experiments.

It was wrote a long time ago, on a Sun server, running Sparc processor under SunOs 2.6.

The main software had long been running in a Virtual Machine, on the x86_64 PC of each user, mais, this small conversion tools wasn't running, so, the legacy server was still on, just for it.

Needless to say that the network ands security teams weren't vey happy with this.

After some search, I discovered that the software generating the raw data was forcing the endianness of the bytes.

Taking this into account, the software was also running perfectly on an x86_64 virtual machine, and the Sun server was then decommissioned. And the users were able to run all the computation without wasting time to transfer back and forth.