Mystery Ebay iBook...

[Zoara]

So I recently came across an iBook on eBay, by a person claiming that on boot it gives a strange boot screen. The listing is right here, https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fulk%2Fitm%2F223328938003

They say this is what it boots into, it appears to be trying to access a network, but if anyone else knows what it is, (or if it’s a good deal) I would greatly appreciate it.

Cheers!

 

[agg24]

As it says in the 2nd screenshot, it is running NetBSD. Interestingly enough it's also running mDNSResponder, which I was not aware ran on non-macOS/Windows systems.

 

[Gorgonops]

which I was not aware ran on non-macOS/Windows systems

mDNSresponder runs on most POSIX compliant systems, including Linux and the various BSDs. Though I believe there's at least one other alternative it's pretty standard to find it on machines that have been configured to do ZeroConf network discovery for... whatever reason. (IE, set up to act as media servers, XBMC/MythTV clients or backends, etc.)

 

[Zoara]

Yeah, that’s what I thought it was, does it appear to be giving any hardware errors however, or is it just unable to find the server?

 

[agg24]

Most of the error messages are related to being unable to lookup hostnames or other DNS issues At the top it mentions not being able to contact 1.1.1.1, which is a new DNS server provided by Cloudflare, which suggests that this machine was set up recently. wpa_supplicant failed with some unknown error, likely because it couldn't find the desired wifi network (though this could also fail if the Airport card was missing or had other issues).

 

[Gorgonops]

I would hazard a guess the hardware is fine. That looks about like the bellyaching I'd expect from a NetBSD machine that can't join a network.