hacking SCO....

[babkin at bellatlantic.net]

> > This may be a dumb question, but if you make a cpio tape archive from
> > data on an SCO system (HTFS filesystem), you can still restore the data
> > off the tape to another system, like FreeBSD with a UFS filesystem,
> > right?
> 
> This should work.  If you run into any issues they will be incompatibilities
> between SCO's cpio and the GNU cpio that FreeBSD uses.

Sometimes you have to not use the option -c on the GNU cpio
when extracting an archive created on SysV (somehow GNU cpio
has a different idea about the -c format but if left out,
it will figure it out well automatically).
 
> > And the followup, can FreeBSD run SCO binaries (SCO Unix 5.0.1)? I am
> > going to try and convert these people from their SCO box over to a
> > FreeBSD system. Just want to make sure the data will come off the tape.
> 
> Yes, but support is really limited.  You need to copy a bunch of core
> libraries onto the FreeBSD machine from the SCO machine to make things work.
> (We just emulate the syscall interface -- you need libc and friends from
> SCO.)

And if you want to stay out of lawsuits, you will also need a
separate license from SCO for these libraries (something like $700).
It's kind of stupid but the SCO lawyers believe that if you've
bought these libraries as a part of OpenServer, you can't run
them on any other OS. The product is called something like SVLL
which stands for System V Libraries for Linux.

-SB
not working for SCO any more