Category Archives: Digitial

OpenBSD 7.3 on the es40 Dec Alpha emulator!

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Yes OpenBSD 7.3 Alpha boots, and installs! And it’s incredibly slow. But it’s running!

For those impatient just download it here: OpenBSD73_Alpha_es40.7z

The root password is: password

I had es40 built this from gdwnldsKSC but I amputated the pcap based networking code. I just wanted a smooth compile. The install took over an hour, as there is ssh keys to generate, and re-ordering and re-linking involved. All of which I disabled in the above image. The root password is password.

Since people never read this, the password for root is password.

One weird thing is that OpenBSD will crash on an assert if you are using the VGA console, so a serial console is a must. After it boots, as you can see the VGA console works fine.

The games work just fine as well. I didn’t bother installing the compilers as it took forever to decompress the base file, and I figured if you wanted it, you could install it. Also since I amputated the networking, there is no X11.

For those of you who want to play with virtual Dec Alpha stuff this one is pretty simple enough.

At the P00>>> prompt type in

boot dka0

And in no time it’ll boot up (takes about 2-3 minutes)

And for those of you who are into these things:

OpenVMS PALcode V1.98-104, Tru64 UNIX PALcode V1.92-105

starting console on CPU 0
initialized idle PCB
initializing semaphores
initializing heap
initial heap 240c0
memory low limit = 1b0000 heap = 240c0, 17fc0
initializing driver structures
initializing idle process PID
initializing file system
initializing hardware
initializing timer data structures
lowering IPL
CPU 0 speed is 1000 MHz
create dead_eater
create poll
create timer
create powerup
access NVRAM
Memory size 512 MB
testing memory
...
probe I/O subsystem
probing hose 1, PCI
probing hose 0, PCI
probing PCI-to-ISA bridge, bus 1
bus 0, slot 1 -- pka -- NCR 53C810
bus 0, slot 2 -- vga -- Cirrus CL-GD5434
bus 0, slot 4 -- ewa -- DE500-BA Network Controller
starting drivers
entering idle loop
initializing keyboard
*** system serial number not set. use set sys_serial_num command.
Partition 0, Memory base: 000000000, size: 020000000
initializing GCT/FRU at 1c8000
Initializing pka ewa
Memory Testing and Configuration Status
  Array       Size       Base Address    Intlv Mode
---------  ----------  ----------------  ----------
    0        512Mb     0000000000000000    4-Way

     512 MB of System Memory
Testing the System
Testing the Disks (read only)
Testing the Network
AlphaServer ES40 Console V7.2-1, built on Jun  9 2006 at 15:36:48
P00>>>boot dka0
(boot dka0.0.0.1.0 -flags 0)
block 0 of dka0.0.0.1.0 is a valid boot block
reading 15 blocks from dka0.0.0.1.0
bootstrap code read in
base = 200000, image_start = 0, image_bytes = 1e00(7680)
initializing HWRPB at 2000
initializing page table at 1ff56000
initializing machine state
setting affinity to the primary CPU
jumping to bootstrap code

OpenBSD/Alpha Primary Boot
VMS PAL rev: 0x4006800010162
OSF PAL rev: 0x400690002015c
Switch to OSF PAL code succeeded.
>> OpenBSD/alpha BOOT 2.0
boot>
booting disk:/bsd: 8562592+683208 [326169+106+499752+320686]=0x9e9790
Unrecognized boot flag '0'.
[ using 1147688 bytes of bsd ELF symbol table ]
Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993
        The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1995-2023 OpenBSD. All rights reserved.  https://www.OpenBSD.org

OpenBSD 7.3-current (GENERIC) #133: Wed May  3 12:45:27 MDT 2023
    [email protected]:/usr/src/sys/arch/alpha/compile/GENERIC
AlphaServer ES40, 1000MHz
8192 byte page size, 1 processor.
real mem = 536870912 (512MB)
rsvd mem = 2801664 (2MB)
avail mem = 514916352 (491MB)
random: good seed from bootblocks
mainbus0 at root
cpu0 at mainbus0: ID 0 (primary), 21264C-6 (pass 4.0)
cpu0: architecture extensions: 305<PAT,MVI,CIX,BWX>
tsc0 at mainbus0: 21272 Chipset, Cchip rev 0
tsc0: 8 Dchips, 2 memory buses of 16 bytes
tsc0: arrays present: 512MB, 0MB, 0MB, 0MB, Dchip 0 rev 1
tsp0 at tsc0 hose 0
pci0 at tsp0 bus 0
siop0 at pci0 dev 1 function 0 "Symbios Logic 53c810" rev 0x01: dec 6600 irq 8
scsibus0 at siop0: 8 targets, initiator 7
sd0 at scsibus0 targ 0 lun 0: <DEC, RZ58 (C) DEC, 2000> serial.DEC_RZ58_(C)_DECSRL0000
sd0: 2048MB, 512 bytes/sector, 4194304 sectors
vga0 at pci0 dev 2 function 0 "Cirrus Logic CL-GD5434-8" rev 0x02
wsdisplay0 at vga0 mux 1
wsdisplay0: screen 0-5 added (80x25, vt100 emulation)
dc0 at pci0 dev 4 function 0 "DEC 21142/3" rev 0x30: dec 6600 irq 20, address 08:00:2b:e5:40:00
ukphy0 at dc0 phy 0: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface, rev. 0: OUI 0x000000, model 0x0000
sio0 at pci0 dev 7 function 0 "Acer Labs M1533 ISA" rev 0xc3
isa0 at sio0
isadma0 at isa0
com0 at isa0 port 0x3f8/8 irq 4: ns16450, no fifo
com0: console
pckbc0 at isa0 port 0x60/5 irq 1 irq 12
pckbd0 at pckbc0 (kbd slot)
wskbd0 at pckbd0 mux 1
wskbd0: connecting to wsdisplay0
pms0 at pckbc0 (aux slot)
wsmouse0 at pms0 mux 0
pcppi0 at isa0 port 0x61
spkr0 at pcppi0
lpt0 at isa0 port 0x3bc/4 irq 7
mcclock0 at isa0 port 0x70/2: mc146818 or compatible
tsp1 at tsc0 hose 1
pci1 at tsp1 bus 0
tsciic0 at tsc0
iic0 at tsciic0
vscsi0 at root
scsibus1 at vscsi0: 256 targets
softraid0 at root
scsibus2 at softraid0: 256 targets
siop0: target 0 now using 8 bit async xfers
root on sd0a (d4f7f3ff7ccee1b1.a) swap on sd0b dump on sd0b
WARNING: / was not properly unmounted
Automatic boot in progress: starting file system checks.
/dev/sd0a (d4f7f3ff7ccee1b1.a): 11877 files, 188223 used, 792736 free (232 frags, 99063 blocks, 0.0% fragmentation)
/dev/sd0a (d4f7f3ff7ccee1b1.a): MARKING FILE SYSTEM CLEAN
pf enabled
starting network
/etc/rc[498]: read: -p: no coprocess

starting early daemons: syslogd pflogd ntpd.
starting RPC daemons:.
savecore: no core dump
checking quotas: done.
clearing /tmp
kern.securelevel: 0 -> 1
creating runtime link editor directory cache.
preserving editor files.
starting network daemons: smtpd sndiod.
starting local daemons: cron.
Wed May 10 04:54:32 MDT 2023
reorder_kernel: failed -- see /usr/share/relink/kernel/GENERIC/relink.log

OpenBSD/alpha (es40.my.domain) (tty00)

login:

And there we go! 

OpenBSD/alpha (es40.my.domain) (tty00)

login: root
Password:
Last login: Tue May  9 12:00:11 on tty00
OpenBSD 7.3-current (GENERIC) #133: Wed May  3 12:45:27 MDT 2023

Welcome to OpenBSD: The proactively secure Unix-like operating system.

Please use the sendbug(1) utility to report bugs in the system.
Before reporting a bug, please try to reproduce it with the latest
version of the code.  With bug reports, please try to ensure that
enough information to reproduce the problem is enclosed, and if a
known fix for it exists, include that as well.

You have new mail.
es40#

Did I mention that the root password is password?

Hiding in plain sight: The 64bit Dec Alpha C compiler

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Of all the Microsoft Windows NT versions, the few of the rare ones include:

  • The i860 version, the original N-Ten that put the NT in NT.
  • The DEC 5000/MIPS version
  • The Clipper version
  • The SPARC/LE version
  • The HP9000/HPPA version
  • The AXP64/ALPHA64 port, the first 64bit version of 2000

Sadly, I don’t have any leads on any of the above. But while I was looking for the first public Win64 compiler that I could remember, it was just the frontend to the Itanium compiler, not letting you actually compile anything. Anyways I was able to find these two downloads:

And both of them have the same Win64 SDK, which includes this quick note in the readme:

Platform SDK support for Win64(tm)

This release of the Platform SDK will allow you to test-compile your
code for Win64. It supports the new 64-bit data types and pre-beta
releases of an IA64 compiler and an ALPHA64 compiler and linker.

1999 Platform SDK

It’s the same thing on both discs from what I remember.

Installing the SDK is certainly a product of it’s time, with a seemingly incredible amount of products to support.

I haven’t tested yet, but I have to wonder how integrated all the tools are into Visual C++. Stay tuned?!

Also there was still POSIX support. Windows 2000 was the last to support all the subsystems.

And of course, the star of the attraction, the 64 bit Test Compiler. There is an incredible amount of products and options to select, It must have been absolute chaos at Microsoft in the late 90s!

If you are on an intel based system, the 64bit compiler will be the top half of the Itanium compiler. It lacks the C2.DLL so it will not emit any assembly or object files. There is no linker libraries either, so for all intents and purposes it’s useless.

However, if you were to install this super preliminary SDK on a Dec Alpha you would instead discover a version 13 build of Microsoft C/C++

Microsoft (R) & Digital (TM) Alpha C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 13.00.8499
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1984-1999.
Copyright (C) Digital Equipment Corporation 1992-1999.
Copyright (C) Compaq Computer Corporation 1998-1999.
All rights reserved.

The Visual C++ 6.0 on the Dec Alpha however is a version 12 compiler. So this is a big surprise for AlphaNT users!

And added to version 13 are these flags:

  /Ap32 enable P32 model
  /Ap64 enable P64 model (default)

That’s right! It turns out that the AXP64 compiler set has been hiding in plain sight for DECADES. I know that it’s so unlikely that we’d ever see any public release of a 64bit version of Windows for the Alpha, but oddly enough the compiler, headers and libraries are all there. YES You can make full EXE’s for AXP64/Alpha64. Of course with no OS, so it’s not like you can run them.

The compilers have been tested on NT 4.0 Terminal Server & 2000 RC2.

For anyone wondering here is how I ran it to compile then link a 64bit exe:

C:\proj>cl /c /Ap64 mt.c /Fomt64.obj
Microsoft (R) & Digital (TM) Alpha C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 13.00.8499
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1984-1999.
Copyright (C) Digital Equipment Corporation 1992-1999.
Copyright (C) Compaq Computer Corporation 1998-1999.
All rights reserved.

mt.c

C:\proj>link mt64.obj /MACHINE:ALPHA64
Microsoft (R) Incremental Linker Version 6.20.8528
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1992-1999. All rights reserved

There is no point sharing the EXE as I mentioned above, there is nothing to run it on. But for the heck of it, here is uuencode compiled into assembly in both 32bit & 64bit mode.

uuencode-axp_asmDownload

I can’t imagine why, but for people who want to take them apart you can download the tools here.

Sadly as of today, there is no way to test. There is one surviving machine with Windows 2003 AXP64, outlined in an article by Raymond Chen. Its a great read about how Alpha64 NT port came to be. The machine is still sitting in Microsoft Archives. Hopefully one day someone can dig it out.

That said there is also version 13 compilers for both Itanium & AMD64. Although we can do stuff with the AMD64 port which I will try to write into something a bit more.. sane.

I found this a few weeks ago, and thanks to @tenox for giving me Alpha access to play a little with this hidden gem. It’s still crazy we’ve all had Alpha64 tool access the entire time.

Digital.com purges DIGITAL

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while finally getting around to renaming aux to aux_ for my AltaVista based search engine, I noticed that the product link, http://www.altavista.software.digital.com/search/index.htm, is suddenly not found.

Well isn’t that a shame.

Ironically in a twist of fate, I found this article, “AltaVista Search Engine History Lesson For Internet Nerds“, with a nice overview of the amazing rise, and tragic neglectful decline of AltaVista. Then what struck me was this line:

Digital was the original owner of the domain that you’re reading now; www.digital.com. 

Wait!? What?!

Did digital.com just purge DIGITAL’s history?

Now I feel like an idiot for not having archived the archive. Always in motion is the past, it’s a shame that DEC’s pages had to be destroyed. History in digital form, especially Digital’s is always in motion and subject to $CURRENT_YEAR.

Sad.

Multia under Thermal Camera

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(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

DEC Multias are known for notoriously overheating. Someone even coined a term “Multia Heat Death”. The typical folklore recommendation of the time was to only run it vertically and replace the built-in fan with a more powerful one.

In modern times one can inexpensively acquire a thermal camera that attaches to a mobile phone. So why not take a peak inside the inferno.

Multia with 166 MHz CPU Under FLIR

This is how Multia looks like in a thermal camera. PS is on top right. CPU on the left. FDD/HDD bottom left.

The CPU, Alpha AXP, runs at around 60C, not great, not terrible.

Scanning up close through individual chips I found this curiosity:

Wedged between the memory chips and the power supply is a little chip that generates almost 100C. That’s a boiling temperature of water. Note the thermal image is shifted in regards to the visual part due to close range.

What does this chip do? I have no clue. Perhaps someone can help here. What I however did to it is this:

Slapped on this really nice radiator. In fact I added little radiators you can buy for Raspberry PI to all the chips generating tons of heat.

This is how the motherboard looks like right now:

I also added a tiny fan on top of the CPU. Drilled some holes in the case and of course replaced the main fan with a highest air flow I could find.

Time will tell if this resolves the heat death, but my Multia now runs much cooler with help of all the radiators and extra fans.

UPDATE in 2022:

Readers frequently asked “what about the heat death chip?“. Multia indeed has one specific chip that is a source of most of Multia casualties. According to NetBSD Multia Page the chip is 74F623 and is located on the bottom (flip) side of the motherboard.

You can tell it’s little charred. I so I went to take a peek with a thermal camera:

Can you locate it? FLIR found it immediately… Up close the chip goes above 100C:

I have added a small heat sink to it and now looks a little better!

Time will tell if it helps or not.

Confessions of a paranoid DEC Engineer: Robert Supnik talks about the great Dungeon heist!

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What an incredible adventure!

Apparently this was all recorded in 2017, and just now released.

It’s very long, but I would still highly recommend watching the full thing.

Bob goes into detail about the rise of the integrated circuit versions of the PDP-11 & VAX processors, the challenges of how Digital was spiraling out of control, and how he was the one that not only championed the Alpha, but had to make the difficult decisions that if the Alpha succeeded that many people were now out of a job, and many directions had to be closed off.

He goes into great detail how the Alpha was basically out maneuvered politically and how the PC business had not only dragged them down by management not embracing the Alpha but how trying to pull a quick one on Intel led to their demise.

Also of interest was his time in research witnessing the untapped possibilities of AltaVista, and how Compaq had bogged it down, and ceded the market to the upstart Google, the inability to launch a portable MP3 player (Although to be fair the iPod wasn’t first to market by a long shot, it was the best user experience by far).

What was also interesting was his last job, working at Unisys and getting them out of the legacy mainframe hardware business and into emulation on x86, along with the lesson that if you can run your engine in primary CPU cache it’s insanely fast (in GCC land -Os is better than -O9).

The most significant part towards the end of course is where he ‘rewinds’ his story to go into his interest in simulations, and of course how he started SIMH when he had some idle time in the early 90’s. SIMH of course has done an incredible amount of work to preserve computing history of many early computers. He also touches on working with the Warren’s TUHS to get Unix v0 up and running on a simulated PDP-7 and what would have been a challenge in the day using an obscure Burroughs disk & controller modified from the PDP-9.

Yes it’s 6 hours long! But really it’s great!

GopherVista

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Continuing with our gopher madness, next up we have GopherVista.  And this is everything I had hoped it would be when I first learned about this project.  I had joked to another friend that it’d be cool to crawl and feed the indexer data in a manner that could basically bring AltaVista back to life.  And we laughed, and I had my utzoo search and that was that.

Except it wasn’t.

However, across the internet, Ben didn’t hear any naysay about limitations or anything to get in the way, and went ahead and wrote a crawler in go, kept the results in a sane name/db order for later sanitisation in and out of AltaVista, and after an aggressive gopher port scan of the internet, he created GopherVista, an index of the gopher-verse, running on Windows 98.

No, really, you read that right, GopherVista backends on Windows 98!

Read all about the creation of GopherVista over a Ben’s blog blog.benjojo.co.uk.

GopherVista

Keep in mind that this is a search engine, not a proxy, so it’s best to use something like Internet Explorer 4, or an ancient Netscape that supports both HTTP 1.1 & Gopher.

I have to also say, that something like this is far more cooler, and better thought out than my utzoo hack, and I’m just happy to have inspired him, but now I really want to re-think my setup, and of course index all the things….

Fun with regex substitutions in Apache

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Continuing from my previous post, I was now able to access my AltaVista server, however from a web browser I was unable to actually view any of the documents remotely.

In the pages though I did get the MS-DOS path to the usenet article in question:

Now how do I turn that into a URL?

Well as it turns out mod_rewrite does support regex, which in turn can do variable re-ordering!

After a bit of googling I found this page on stackoverflow, on how to convert a date between UK/US formats:

s/(\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2})/\-$3-$2/

Simple, right?  So what is going on here?  The parenthesis define a variable set, and on the substitution part you can recall them with $1, $2 , $3 etc.  So using this recipe I could take something like this:

u:\b227\comp\sys\laptops\3080

and convert it into the following:

http://debian7/usenet/b227/comp/sys/laptops/3080

The code for this would look something like this:

Substitute "s|>u:.([a-z]{1,}[0-9]{3,})\\\([0-9a-z]{1,})\\\([0-9]{1,})|---><a href="\"http://debian7/usenet/$1/$2/$3\""]Click for article|"

Although for some reason it’s embedding the URL’s even though I specified code formatting.

Now all I had to do was install IIS 4.0 off the Option Pack CD-ROM, onto my Windows NT 4.0 workstation, and create a virtual directory of /usenet which then pointed to the U: drive where AltaVista did it’s indexing.

So to this point that gives me a config file much like this:

ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
DocumentRoot /var/www
SSLProxyEngine On
ProxyPass "/altavista/" "https://10.12.0.16"
ProxyPassReverse "/altavista/" "https://10.12.0.16/"
ProxyRequests Off
RewriteEngine On

SetOutputFilter INFLATE;SUBSTITUTE;DEFLATE
AddOutputFilterByType SUBSTITUTE text/html
#clean up urls
Substitute "s|127.0.0.1:6688|debian7/altavista|n"
Substitute "s|file:///C:\Program Files\DIGITAL\AltaVista Search\My Computer\images\|http://debian7/images/|n"
#protect the page
Substitute "s|launch=app||n"
Substitute "s|?pg=config&what=init|?pg=h|n"
#fix title
Substitute "s|<IMG src=\"http://debian7/images/av_personal.gif\" alt=\"[AltaVista] \"  BORDER=0 ALIGN=middle HEIGHT=72 VSPACE=0 HSPACE=0>|<a href=\"http://debian7/altavista\"><IMG src=\"http://debian7/images/av_personal.gif\" alt=\"[AltaVista] \"  BORDER=0 ALIGN=middle HEIGHT=72 VSPACE=0 HSPACE=0>|--->|n"
Substitute "s|u:.([a-z]{1,}[0-9]{3,})\\\([0-9a-z]{1,})\\\([0-9a-z]{1,})\\\([0-9a-z]{1,})\\\([0-9a-z]{1,})\\\([0-9a-z]{1,})\\\([0-9]{1,})|---><a href=\"http://debian7/usenet/\/\/\/\/\/\/\\">Click for article|"
Substitute "s|>u:.([a-z]{1,}[0-9]{3,})\\\([0-9a-z]{1,})\\\([0-9a-z]{1,})\\\([0-9a-z]{1,})\\\([0-9a-z]{1,})\\\([0-9]{1,})|---><a href=\"http://debian7/usenet/\/\/\/\/\/\\">Click for article|"
Substitute "s|>u:.([a-z]{1,}[0-9]{3,})\\\([0-9a-z]{1,})\\\([0-9a-z]{1,})\\\([0-9a-z]{1,})\\\([0-9]{1,})|---><a href=\"http://debian7/usenet/\/\/\/\/\\">Click for article|"
Substitute "s|>u:.([a-z]{1,}[0-9]{3,})\\\([0-9a-z]{1,})\\\([0-9a-z]{1,})\\\([0-9]{1,})|---><a href=\"http://debian7/usenet/\/\/\/\\">Click for article|"
Substitute "s|>u:.([a-z]{1,}[0-9]{3,})\\\([0-9a-z]{1,})\\\([0-9]{1,})|---><a href=\"http://debian7/usenet/\/\/\\">Click for article|"
# Need links for the u:\news097f1\b120\comp\society\futures22
Substitute "s|>u:.(news[0-9]{3,}f[0-9])\\\([b0-9]{1,})\\\([a-z]{1,})\\\([a-z]{1,})\\\([a-z]{1,})\\\([a-z]{1,})\\\([a-z]{1,})\\\([0-9]{1,})|---><a href=\"http://debian7/usenet/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\\">Click for article|"
Substitute "s|>u:.(news[0-9]{3,}f[0-9])\\\([b0-9]{1,})\\\([a-z]{1,})\\\([a-z]{1,})\\\([a-z]{1,})\\\([a-z]{1,})\\\([0-9]{1,})|---><a href=\"http://debian7/usenet/\/\/\/\/\/\/\\">Click for article|"
Substitute "s|>u:.(news[0-9]{3,}f[0-9])\\\([b0-9]{1,})\\\([a-z]{1,})\\\([a-z]{1,})\\\([a-z]{1,})\\\([0-9]{1,})|---><a href=\"http://debian7/usenet/\/\/\/\/\/\\">Click for article|"
Substitute "s|>u:.(news[0-9]{3,}f[0-9])\\\([b0-9]{1,})\\\([a-z]{1,})\\\([a-z]{1,})\\\([0-9]{1,})|---><a href=\"http://debian7/usenet/\/\/\/\/\\">Click for article|"
# Need links for  u:\news002f1\b1\fa.poli-sci
Substitute "s|>u:.(news[0-9]{3,}f[0-9])\\\([b0-9]{1,})\\\([a-z\.\-]{1,})\\\([0-9]{1,})|---><a href=\"http://debian7/usenet/\/\/\/\\">Click for article|"

<Location /usenet/>
    ProxyPass  http://10.12.0.16/usenet/
    RewriteEngine On
    SetOutputFilter INFLATE;SUBSTITUTE;DEFLATE
    AddOutputFilterByType SUBSTITUTE text/html
</Location>

bla bla rest of the 000-default crap....

Simple right?

Searching for AltaVista

Searching for AltaVista

So now I get a nicely formatted page, I can click the mountain icon, and I jump back to home, and I can click on the articles and, because I have no extensions or MIME types to intercept it’ll just download them to my PC.  I guess I need to go through them all, convert them from UNIX format to MS-DOS, and stick a .txt extension on every single one of them.

I’m still thinking this thing is far too rickety to put on the internet, but we’ll see.

Fun with Apache, (mod_proxy, mod_rewrite), stunnel, And AltaVista Personal search

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As you may remember from my prior attempt at using Altavista Search I ran out of space, and found out it only serves pages on 127.0.0.1:6688 and is pretty much hardcoded to do so.  It’s a “fine” hybrid java 1.01 application, with the bulk of it being java. Â I finally got around to setting up a VM, and unpacking all of the utzoo archives, and indexing them.  I should have done something about the IO because this took too long (KVM).

SIXTEEN HOURS!!!

SIXTEEN HOURS!!!

So, to cheat the system, I installed stunnel as a simple https to http proxy, which let me access my search VM anywhere.  However, it still embedded 127.0.0.1 in all the pages.

via stunnel

via stunnel

Enter an Apache reverse proxy to talk to stunnel to talk to AltaVista search!

First to enable a few modules:

a2enmod substitute
a2enmod proxy
a2enmod ssl
a2enmod proxy_http
a2enmod rewrite

And adding this into the config:

SSLProxyEngine On
ProxyPass “/altavista/” “https://10.12.0.16”
ProxyPassReverse “/altavista/” “https://10.12.0.16/”
ProxyRequests Off
RewriteEngine On
SetOutputFilter INFLATE;SUBSTITUTE;DEFLATE
AddOutputFilterByType SUBSTITUTE text/html
Substitute “s/1997/2016/ni”
Substitute “s/97/16/ni”
Substitute “s|127.0.0.1:6688|debian7/altavista|n”
Substitute “s|file:///C:\Program Files\DIGITAL\AltaVista Search\My Computer\images\|http://debian7/images/|n”
Substitute “s|launch=app||n”
Substitute “s|<a href=http://debian7/altavista/?pg=q&what=0&fmt=d|<!—|n”
Substitute “s|><strong>|—>|n”
Substitute “s|</strong></a>||n”
Substitute “s|>u:\|->u:\|n”

This let me redirect all of those requests into a VM called debian7 on the /altavista path.  I also copied the images to the apache server, and now I get something that looks correct!

Apache in the mix!

Apache in the mix!

I cut the results short… But here is a search of something simple:

About 16598 documents match your query.

About 16598 documents match your query.

I also killed all the ‘working URL’s that simply open a desktop application on the index ‘server’.  Naturally it was a personal service, but as a server this isn’t any good.  As such you can’t click on any search results now.  I need something else to figure out how to take the result blocks like “u:\b128\comp\databases\2852” and turn them into URL’s.

Also, as much as I want to re-index I would be best to cut off the headers, or most of them so the preview lines make sense.  Xref, Path, even From & Newsgroups don’t interest me.

I hate to leave it as ‘good enough’ but if anyone has a solution…. I’ll be glad to make this wonderful resource available!