Well I was looking for a way to move data out of the 386BSD vm without too much pain, and I’ve just been hitting this brick wall about trying to compile apache.
You see the thing is, 386BSD is so old, it doesn’t have dynamic libraries, and a uname command so you have to ‘fool’ the configure scripts, and even then if you do manage to get an executable it’ll just crash… For some reason gdb couldn’t help with the whole thing… very annoying. I think it may be a program size limit..? Either way, I’m sure it was ‘fixed’ in NetBSD 0.8 ..
So after googling around the ancient news groups, I came across this post..
NCSA httpd 1.1/1.2/1.3 compile straight (well almost) out of the box. I’ve not tried the CERN one yet. I’m happy with my NCSA 1.3.
Well, now that’s interesting… Remember that NCSA gave us Mosaic, but they also gave us httpd, which apache is based on. However NCSA no longer hosts the httpd source code… It’s gone with the wind…. Except for this Slackware mirror.
So after downloading it, and building, naturally…. it crashed. However this time I was able to fire up GDB, and see that it was crashing in the mime initialization… It seems it was using a null pointer… So for the heck of it, I changed the hash macro to use the 2nd definition, and it worked!!
So after all of that, I built some stuff for 386BSD to test the transfer of the web server, and it “seems” ok to me… Naturally I wouldn’t expect this to withstand any large amounts of traffic as it doesn’t seem to fork itself… I also suspect this version may work with the VAX 4.X BSD stuff as well…
httpd-1.3
com (CP/M emulator)
GNUMake-3.75
Frotz-2.32
screen-3.7.1
gcc-2.5.8
bash-1.14.7
bash-2.0
It is kind of scary how this old software is disappearing, and at the same time, we hear this promise of how we can keep everything forever in the “digital age”… At any rate, I guess this preserves a somewhat usable OS/Webserver configuration circa 1993…
Good work! You know this is scary to me. Web-server from 1993…I used to USE the net a few times a week back then. We had a 9600 baud modem running on a 286 Compaq (can't remember the model of the machine, wish I could). Sad that the software from those days is hard to find.
Say, can you think of anything fun I could do with a Sparc Ultra 10 I have sitting in my garage?
An ultra 10? Well.. the Ultras are too new for SunOS.. And they won't run the 32bit only versions of Solaris…
I'd probably say, try OpenSolaris… It should run on an ultra 10… And the dev tools are now free!
Either that, or OpenBSD….
Back around 1993 the 386BSD stuff wouldn't work on my pc, so I went with Linux… which is sad because we didn't have TCP/IP… Not that it mattered, the only internet access I had was shell access, but there was this great program for Windows 3.1 called SLiRP that you would compile on the remote unix system, and it'd let you use the unix machine's tcp/ip stack from windows via a winsock.dll … Oh it was awesome… irc, mosaic, telnet and all that with no ppp/slip infastructure.. And nobody at the uni ever cried about us wasting time on IRC because they never saw it (lol long before all this network packet inspection, and cheap sniffers).
kids have it rough these days, it's way harder to hide what you are doing over the network.
I've added screen & gcc to the list… Although for screen, you'll quickly run out of pty's. The default number is FOUR!! So it'll be a matter of rebuilding a kernel.
Also if you unpack gcc, don't forget the old gcc 1.3.6 stuff is first in the path so you'll have to rename the gcc/g++ in /usr/bin so that the /usr/local/bin versions will pick up.