In some weird twist almost all the old NetBSD source code is gone. again

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I don’t know what is up, but it even was such a perplexing loss that even bitsavers is now saving NetBSD.

bitsavers doesn’t normally image files from active sites, but when archive.netbsd.org was down for an extended period of time and no mirrors were found, having at least the NetBSD iso files mirrored worldwide seemed like a prudent thing to do. This is a massive storage and bandwidth burden we’ve taken on, please be considerate towards us and our mirrors. For example, people trying to run 10’s of rsyncs in parallel will be banned.

aek 20231002

It reminds me back to the work of trying to revive NetBSD 0.8, and that fun adventure, then it all showed up. I saved it and moved on, but now it seems to be my turn to save the past again.

I know its a terrible URL but here it is : My old NetBSD archive

Highlights include:

I was interested in running the first public VAX versions, and 1.1 didn’t run on VAX so it didn’t interest me. Sorry.

Otherwise, you’re welcome

9 thoughts on “In some weird twist almost all the old NetBSD source code is gone. again”

      • Thank you, and everyone involved in the effort, for preserving bits of our history of computing.

        I left a comment on an older post almost 8 years ago on the broken gsrc09 directory of NetBSD-0.9 where the file fragment numbered 024 was cut short, and 025~026 were missing. They are missing here, too.

        I then discovered the “Infomagic BSDisc Volume 1 Number 1” dump you stored on archive.org, which actually included an export (non-US, no crypt(3)) version of NetBSD-0.9 files. Everything there was extracted with no problem and seems to be genuine and original.

        The path on the CD-ROM is /mirror/NetBSD-0.9/source/gsrc09.

        For completeness it would be nice if you could update your IA NetBSD archive using infomagic-1-1-93.iso as the source.

        Keep archiving, keep saving!

        • wow I didn’t realise that! yeah for sure got to update stuff then!

          I didnt know it was missing stuff back in the day I wonder if I had a better snapshot or what.

          Thanks for posting here to let me know I’d probably have missed it otherwise!

          • Thank you for uploading these sets!

            Probably makes sense to add the BSDisc stuff as an additional folder rather than merging because there are a few other differences.

            The BSDisc set has some extra readmes and is missing the combined tgz files for the sets along with a bunch of stuff that was included in the security dist set in addition to crypt: su, ftpd, lock, login, passwd etc. and other tools on that required userland authentication that defaulted to using crypt.

            I’m also pretty sure the mirrored copy reflected the original ftp upload of NetBSD 0.9 on 8/23/93 with regard to gsrc09.024 being corrupted. There’s a FIXED file on the InfoMagic BSDisc gsrc directory from the corrected later reupload. See https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.bsd/c/i_6WXCHfIRw/m/USqJyXhs1VcJ.

            Just thought it was interesting. There’s supposed to a Transameritech Release 3 cd from around April 94 that also had NetBSD 0.9 but I’m sure it omitted the security stuff too. Would be interesting to compare to the others.

  2. I’m wondering if TUHS could or would help out with this? They have a whole rsync infrastructure of their own set up and (I think?) would be used to taking the hit.

    • I guess whoever has cheap CDN’s these days. I know archive.org has some big stuff, but torrents were going to be the way of the future where everyone could ‘do their part’ even a 64kb/capped stream from a bunch of people would help, but sadly we don’t seem to live in that world.

      Cloudflare has CDN but I think its more for images.

      Azure starts at $0.08 USD a gig, so no doubt it’d be expensive.. I guess the foundation can beg for cheaper pricing or some parternship but that’s way out of my hands.

      • “Torrents were going to be the way of the future where everyone could ‘do their part’ even a 64kb/capped stream from a bunch of people would help”

        Problem is mostly with ISPs. Many of them don’t offer flat prices anymore (and many of them are copying mobile network tactics and their “GB packs”) so you can’t afford to share anymore. And were them still offer flat monthly prices, they don’t offer synchronous speeds even in SBS packs, capping upload speeds sometimes to 1:4, 1:8 or 1:10 ratios.

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