Oh hello, Junos is a thing that exists, and I have it now, I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A little story... I was on a little upgrade spree lately, getting a little bit of recently decommissioned server-grade hardware for some basic upgrades as one does, trying to upgrade my wannabe mini-pc server as if it were a real server, (it's the thought that counts, so I'm told).
And so I'm browsing server parts, I buy a couple of server SSDs, and before knocking off for the night I get a random recommendation, and on a whim, I bought a pSLC M.2 SSD with the intent to use it as a scratch disk in the old laptop I use alongside the mini-server (because if it ain't broke add some more random obscure crap to it, amirite?)
A week or so goes by, not really thinking about it much, I get it yesterday, and to my surprise when I pop it into the laptop rather than being unpartitioned or freshly formatted like other drives I've gotten, it's got a bunch of odd sized primary partitions and Windows doesn't recognize them...
Okay, I may be kind of a normy these days, but let's see what's actually on there, so I booted a live Xubuntu session and muddled my way through it, look at it with the partition tool, so on the disk we've got primary and secondary efi boot partitions, Primary and Secondary ext4 Linux partitions, lvm2 partition, linux-swap partition, pretty odd setup for a small drive.
So I go ahead and open up the terminal, mount the first ext4 partition and start poking around in there trying to figure it out; I find that it's an install of Wind River Linux, hostname: watatsumi, briefly look around in the file browser, see a Jhost_core (bunch-o-numbers) x86-64 rpm package, guess that means it's an x64-86 install anyway, take a few notes about all of it.
lsblk, find the big lvm2 partition is all nested Jvg_P-(x)
(Jlvmrootrw, Jlvmjunos, Jlvmvm, Jlvmspare)
Okay, that was fun, but this is starting to get a little above my paygrade, time to ask the LLMs what they think, debate with them about the meaning of life and the random notes I made about this peculiar drive until one of them just one shots it on a fresh context with the facts I'd gathered so far, "This drive came from a Juniper Networks router... very likely a high-end routing platform, running Junos OS with VM Host."
"Oh hmm, I guess that explains why it says, 'Juniper Networks' on the box it came in and the custom JUN firmware it seems to have..." 🤔 ~(10,000 IQ moment)
In my defense, someone else actually manufactured the SSD and I didn't guess the box was actually related in any way, it's not like they sent me a manual with it or anything.
SMART data on the drive said it's nearly new, about a week of uptime total, and only about a dozen power-ons before me, so maybe it was a spare for testing, or pulled from a demo unit, idk.
TLDR: I unwittingly bought an SSD from Juniper Networks that has Wind River Linux 8.0.0.20 and the Junos backend networking software installed on it (version 19.4 I think? iirc), that I just learned exists. Everything seems to have been written to the drive on March 24, 2020, with files dated from around mid-November 2019. And I think the drive might be from a carrier router (possibly the ACX6360-ox).
And that's been my recent unexpected adventure in server components and software,
I asked the LLMs about it and they all basically said,
"Some server people might be interested in that kind of stuff, but you can just format it and keep on doing whatever dumb idea you started with if you want."
So, I figured I should at least tell some real people about it before I did anything too drastic. I'm not trying to sell it or anything; I'm still planning on using the drive as a scratch disk once I've satisfied any curiosity about it, (the specs say it should be a little faster than the one I've been using anyway).
-
I wasn't actually planning on getting so deep into the weeds, I really don't know that much about it, it was just a curious puzzle to solve while giving me an excuse to get in some Linux practice because I haven't used it much in years. I really don't have the budget for that sort of carrier hardware, at least not more than a tiny piece of it, certainly not until my student loans are paid off in another year-ish anyway. And even then, I was thinking more in the realm of a standard server I could stuff full of RAM and secondhand GPUs. Still, it's been interesting looking into this so far, so I thought I'd share and see what people thought about it.
This is my first post here, a lot earlier than I intended, though I figured I'd probably make my way here eventually, so, 'Hello, and nice to meet you.' I suppose.