After a bit of promising spring weather and even dry sidewalks, it started snowing again.
A co-worker asked me if I knew any Lisp and how could he get a set of Java sources to be indented automatically. In the programming team a few users' Emacsen indent differently and that really messes diffs. I said it should be easy, just make a list and go through it running open, indent and close on each file and that I'd just need a glance at the reference. I swiftly proceeded to write him a function that did the visit-indent-kill cycle and was interrupted before I made another that would pick the files from a directory. Instead I gave him an awk one-liner that would generate the neccessary script. It worked. Emacs is hideous if editing anything, but the elisp interpreter is really handy and the manual is rather good.
So we started to wonder about the root of the problem. It appears emacs20 and emacs21 indent some things differently. We upgraded everyone to 21 and ran the indents as a batch job.
Still didn't get the IBM 7012 320 to boot. I have the serial port pinout but no cable. I haven't tried kludging it with wire yet.
I did shut down the 7006. Phew! I could make a third cat out of all that dust. I took out the framebuffer in it that I had added a vga-style connector to. Didn't get a signal out of that either with 7012 in diagnostics, though.
I took apart the 8mm IBM DAT and after nudging some things back and forth and extracting the stuck tape, it started working again. Ejecting and taking tapes and obeying scsi eject. No data in or out and no mt commands work in Irix, though. The 7210-001 CD neither. And 7012 doesn't boot off an Aix CD in another known to work drive. Oh, well. At least I did some spring cleaning shuffling all that stuff around.
I should count my serial ports and see that every machine has a console. Or buy a terminal server.