I saw this post from Action Retro over on twitter, and it just reminds me why we can’t have nice things on the internet. Some jerk is always going to destroy stuff, simply because it takes effort to create, while tearing down things only shows impotent rate.
FrogFind in trouble!
FROGFIND UPDATE: Someone has been hammering the site with a scraper using rotating proxies that I can’t block. It’s pegging my server CPU at 100%. This has caused a service interruption. Working on solutions :'(
So annoying!
However, the source to Frog Find is available on github, so why not self-host a copy?
Since I’m using WordPress (not even touching that crazy WP drama!) I’ve already got a Linux machine running PHP/Apache (good olde LAMP!) so I thought this would be simple as, make a new virtual server, git clone the repo, and add a new entry to the olde DNS & Haproxy servers, and I’d be ready to go live!
[Tue Nov 19 11:35:50.601570 2024] [php:warn] [pid 25997:tid 25997] [client 127.0.0.1:49854] PHP Warning: require_once(vendor/autoload.php): Failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /srv/www/FrogFind/index.php on line 2
Well, that was disappointing.
Looking at the repo there is this composer.json, so obviously it’s got something to do with that.
Looking around there is an incredible amount of information for installing & using it in your projects, but I don’t know why I struggled to find out how to actually use/deploy it. But it’s super simple, and of course it just needs you to curl & run stuff, which of course will never be used as a vector to spread malware. Never.
Installing composer into the local directory is simple as:
And that’s it! It’ll get everything needed, and now hitting the site:
Just like that!
Since mine sits behind Cloudflare it locks out old browsers. I wonder about modifying some proxy to use 2 SSL’s to support ancient SSL, and ‘modern’ to proxy stuff, although it sure wouldn’t load new pages, but it could gate to services like a Frog Find on a service like Cloud Flare and modern crypto.
I’d encourage people to run locally hosted on their own LANs a copy of FrogFind. At least that way you won’t be interrupted by jerks.
After seeing the spotlight on twitter from WinWorld, on NetManage Chameleon, an old TCP/IP stack that supported Windows 3.0! With more details over on the forum. I was inspired to set it up myself.
I did go a bit overboard showing how to install MS-DOS & Windows 3.0 on Qemu. Maybe it’ll help someone who wants to try to use Qemu, but is too scared? Maybe I moved too quickly.
One thing I did do differently in this run, is launching the monitor and a serial port as tcp servers so I could telnet into the VM, effectively having a way to share text like a clipboard back and forth. I’m kind of surprised I hadn’t really started using Qemu in this manner much earlier.
A while back I had made a small post about getting Graylog running on Windows. It was fun, as it’s just JAVA so you know it should be portable, and other than some weird disk access thing it does seem to run fine.
Of course, the next step is to create a dashboard to replace what I used on wp-statistics, as it was crashing taking up 100% of my CPU, and exceeding PHP’s 12GB of RAM per process limit. You know things are messed up when I’m replacing you with not one, but 2 Java apps! (Graylog & Opensearch).
magical dashboard
It’s by no means perfect, but the guide How to se -up graylog geoip configuration, is all around great to have. The rest of it is me learning how to do aggregate searches, and simple lists, to see latest hits, 404’s and count the pages and build a graph.
Again, this is all good, now for the real question, how to get this onto the Internet?!
The firs thing to do is enable cors.. It’s for being on the internet!
http_enable_cors = true
Next enable the external URI name
http_external_uri = https://dash.board.com/
And now the changes I had to make in my haproxy config
I kind of wish I saved the logs while going crazy but YES for some reason it’ll try to reference itself as /api/api. I don’t know why, so I had to do some uri regex to fix that. Neat!
Next for some reason Graylog responds that all .js (javascript) files are actually text. Chrome doesn’t allow that to work, so yes you need to set the content type header to “application/javascript” for Chrome to be happy.
I had wasted over an hour with this and couldn’t get it working. So, I walked away for a few hours, and it suddenly was working. I think Cloudflare was doing some caching against it.
This is probably too terse to be really useful, and I lost all the pages I was reading about setting stuff in haproxy as I was doing that incognito. Oops. I picked this config out of fragments from five other people’s stuff. There is other considerations to host it on a subdirectory of a public site, but I just wanted to K.I.S.S.
I had a small twitter account, and I tried not to get dragged into anything that would just be basically wasting my time. Just stay focused and on topic. FINE. I just wanted to see if anyone ever saw it, if it was even worth the effort of doing WIP’s as I didn’t want to make it super annoying.
I logged on to post a fun update that I’d finally gotten a Phar Lap 386 version 4.1 app to do something halfway useful, the sairen AGI interpreter up and running in the most basic sense.
Talking about DOS Extenders is spammy and manipulation!
I don’t get what triggered it, but oh well there was a ‘have a review’ and yeah that was fine. Great. So I’m unlocked so I go ahead and post with the forbidden topic, as I’m clearly dumb, and forgetting that Twitter is for hate mobs & posting pictures of food, and cat pictures.
The Sairen AGI interpreter built with Watcom 386/7.0 & Phar Lap 386 4.1
So yes, that was a line too far, and now that’s it.
Now some of you may think, if you buy ‘the plan’ you’ll no doubt be exempt from the heavy hands of Twitter
3 squids a month
But I already was and had been for a while.
Your account is suspended
So that’s the end of that. I guess it’s all too confusing for a boomer like me.
Cancel me, cancel you
So needless to say I cancelled Twitter as well. Kind of sneaky they didn’t auto-cancel taking money.
So yeah, with that out of the way, let’s continue into DOS Extender land. I added just enough 386 magic, onto github: neozeed/sarien286. Yes I see now it really was a poorly named repo. Such is life.
There is 3 main things for porting old programs where they take care of all the logic, it’s going to be File I/O, Screen I/O, and timers. Luckily this time it was easier than I recalled.
Over on usenet (google groups link) Chris Giese shared this great summary on direct memory access from various methods:
/* 32-bit Watcom C with CauseWay DOS extender */
int main(void) {
char *screen = (char *)0xA0000;
initMode13();
*screen = 1;
return 0;
}
/* 32-bit Watcom C with DOS/4GW extender
(*** This code is untested ***) */
int main(void) {
char *screen = (char *)0xA0000;
initMode13();
*screen = 1;
return 0;
}
/* 32-bit Watcom C with PharLap DOS extender
(*** This code is untested ***) */
#include <dos.h> /* MK_FP() */
#define PHARLAP_CONVMEM_SEL 0x34
int main(void) {
char far *screen = (char far *)MK_FP(PHARLAP_CONVMEM_SEL, 0xA0000);
initMode13();
*screen = 1;
return 0;
}
/* 16-bit Watcom C (real mode) */
#include <dos.h> /* MK_FP() */
int main(void) {
char far *screen = (char far *)MK_FP(0xA000, 0);
initMode13();
*screen = 1;
return 0;
}
It is missing the Phar Lap 286 method:
/* Get PM pointer to text screen */
DosMapRealSeg(0xb800,4000,&rseg);
textptr=MAKEP(rseg,0);
But it’s very useful to have around as documentation is scarce.
Which brings me to this (again?)
Phar Lap 386|Dos-Extender 4.1
Years ago, I had managed to score a documentation set, and a CD-ROM with a burnt installed copy of the extender. I didn’t know if it was complete, but of course these things are so incredibly rare I jumped on the chance to get it!
2011!
Unfortunately, I didn’t feel right breaking the books apart, and scanning them, then add in some bad life choices on my part, and I ended up losing the books. Fast forward *years* later and Foone uploaded a document set on archive.org. GREAT! As far as I can tell the only difference in what I had is that I’ve got a different serial number. Thankfully I was smart enough to at lest email myself a copy of the CD-ROM contents! And this whole thing did inspire me to gut and upload the Phar Lap TNT 6.0 that I had also managed to acquire.
Although unlocking the video RAM wasn’t too bad, once I knew what to do, the other thing is to hook the clock for a timer. ISR’s are always hell, but at least this is a very simple one:
The methodology is almost always the same, as always, it’s the particular incantation.
So yeah, it’s super simple, but the 8086/80286 calling down to DOS/BIOS from protected mode via the int86 just had to be changed to int386, and some of the register structs being redefined. I’m not sure why but the video/isr code compiled with version 7 of Watcom, but crashes. I think its more drift in the headers, as the findfirst/findnext/assert calls are lacking from Watcom 7, so I just cheated and linked with Watcom 10. This led to another strange thing where the stdio _iob structure was undefined. In Watcom 10 it became __iob, so I just updated the 7 headers, and that actually worked. I had to include some of the findfirst/next structures into the fileglob.c file but it now builds and links fine.
Another thing to do differently when using Watcom 7, is that it doesn’t include a linker, rather you need to use 386LINK. Generating the response file, as there is so many objects didn’t turn out too hard once I realized that by default everything is treated as an object.
Another fun thing is that you can tell the linker to use the program ‘stub386.exe’ so that it will run ‘run386’ on it’s own, making your program feel more standalone. From the documentation:
386 | LINK has the ability to bind the stub loader program, STUB386.EXE, to
the front of an application .EXP file. The resulting .EXE file can be run by
typing the file name, just like a real mode DOS program. The stub loader
program searches the execution PATH for RUN386.EXE (the
386 | DOS-Extender executable) and loads it; 386 | DOS-Extender then loads
the application .EXP file following the stub loader in the bound .EXE file.
To autobind STUB386.EXE to an application .EXP file and create a bound
executable, specify STUB386.EXE as one of the input object files on the
command line.
So that means I can just use the following as my linker response file.
One interesting observation is that the 386 extender is actually smaller than the 286 one. And being able to compile with full optimisations it is significantly faster.
16bit on the left, 32bit on the right.
I ran both the prior 16bit protected mode version (on the left), and 32bit version (on the right), on the same IBM PS/2 80386DX 16Mhz machine. You can see how the 32bit version is significantly faster!.
I really should profile the code, and have it load all the resources into RAM, it does seem to be loading and unloading stuff, which considering were in protected mode, we should use all ram, or push the VMM386 subsystem to page, and not do direct file swapping, like it’s the 1970s.
I saw this video and I was like sold! I have this PowerMac 6400/180 so I figured this would be good. The problem was my network card was acting up so I figured instead of troubleshooting it I’ll just format it and go from there.
the machine is very much an Old World Macintosh, so that limits me from OS X. It’s 603ev CPU it’s not all that advanced either. I have an 8.1 ISO that I’ve been using under 68k emulation but the limit it has is old multimedia stuff ins t 68k compatible as nobody would imagine emulation putting 68k at speeds above a gigahertz.
I went looking for a 8.6 ISO, and that is where the fun hit me again that many so-called ISO images aren’t. Rather they are giant floppy disk images with the media headers and/or partition tables being obliterated. As an ISO they don’t detect at all, and as a giant floppy, of course they don’t boot as MacOS checks if it is on read-only media.
This ISO isn’t an ISO
very annoying
I did manage to finally find one that does work however!
I should also add the MacOS 8.1 CD-ROM image Ive been using as again,l I have the same issue where so many are headderless ‘floppies’ and not actual CD-ROM’s that don’t work in Cockatrice III or an actual Mac using BlueSCSI.
MacOS 8.1 CD-ROM on Cockatrice III
Sorry the image shows in black & white, but as you can see from the CD-ROM background it is in fact booted from the CD-ROM. You can download it from here: https://archive.org/details/mac-os-8.1-iso_202401
In no time, I was able to get online only to find that the power Mac plugin’s seem to be unavailable for anything and unsupported.
old netscape website
but the rendition of the old Netscape page was a treat!
Now I do have a Windows Surface RT tablet, and sure enough pluggin the proxy values, and YES the video site does work!
Warpstream on Windows RT
Very cool! So it turns out Protoweb can actually save all those old devices that work fine enough, but not fine enough for ‘Modern platforms’.
I needed to setup another WordPress for something else, and I host it on a server with no https. However of course it’s fronted by a proxy with https. And WordPress embeddeds the http into the stream, and changing that with redirects causes it to ping pong like crazy.
So this is by no means the best fix, it is *A* fix. For me. YMMV.
I had to add this into the site config from apache
<Directory /var/www/mynewsite.org/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride all
Order allow,deny
allow from all
Require all granted
</Directory>
And does that work? no it sets up mod_rewrite (you did a2enamod it right?! RIGHT?!)
RewriteEngine on
Header always set Content-Security-Policy: upgrade-insecure-requests
RewriteRule ^$ /wordpress [L]
So the big thing here is updating the header. I had to search a bit to find that part, so yeah that was needed. The other part is that wordpress really wants to be in /wordpress not in the root, so a simple RewriteRule will put that in it’s place.
Good Grief.
I should explain my hosting situation more. I’ve been forced into some kind of nomadic situation, and thanks to some weird issue on Azure’s WordPress container thing my site ate itself. Like it literally destroyed the files. I had backups of course, and well either being evicted from a data centre because of the Windows CE Nethack scandal, or having hosting companies either go under with no warning, or drop me for being far too much traffic than they signed up for, I’d taken to not only owning my data but hosting it all myself.
I do enjoy the ‘nomad’ aspect of it all, but it’s a little crazy. I like to think of this as portable stealth hosting as I can blend into user traffic, and I can physically take my data with me. Of course, I have backups as well!
So to describe the setup I guess i need a fine MS Paint style drawing!
How the magic works
I have been using this kind of setup to some degree going back to when I setup the utzoo search engine back in 2017. I’d only expanded on it to host everything now. Working backwards I need to blend into residential traffic, so I need a typical 90’s like office vpn, which means PPTP. So going on lowendbox, I get some cheap VPS, install haproxy and PPTP server onto that. This way I’m basically renting out a static IP address for less than a Starbucks, but it let’s me have the freedom to move around and just look like user traffic, as the PPTP connection is bi-directional.
This way I can use various backend servers to split up various domains on the same port. Since cloudflare fronts I don’t need any weird SSL certificate with combination domains. I also get to sneak in a redirect for the old virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com, as google had a major fit about me not having it at the top level domain. The Windows NT 3.1 server is a Qemu virtual machine running on the VPS. It just has a static page so there wasn’t much point being all that sophisticated.
I then setup a Cloudflare account, and then point my domain directly to the VPS. This also let’s me grab a certificate from Cloudflare to load onto the VPS to encrypt the conversation from them to my VPS, just as the PPTP connection is also encrypted. Another advantage of PPTP over say IPsec is that older OSs like Windows NT 4.0 support it. Not to mention with tunnels being left up so incredibly long, once again I want to blend in as user traffic, and IPsec or OpenVPN just draws too much attention. It sure did in China, and sadly that’s the model I fully expect more and more of the world to be following.
Cloudflare Full Encryption
The other advantage of Cloudflare is that they do some aggressive caching which makes hosting on a residential connection viable. In this case over the last 30 days I’ve only had to ‘upload’ 41 of the 158GB of traffic.
73% of my bandwidth is cached!
If something gets popular this can make all the difference! Again, it’s key to being stealthy.
In the same way it also allows me to host my own Exchange, or any other weird application. Which then takes me to the Apache config. I have Windows 10 on the Lenovo, and loaded up WSLv1 so I could have Windows natively integrate with the filesystem. I also like that it’s got such low overhead as WSLv1 is just a subsystem, unlike v2 being a lightweight VM, like shades of Win/OS2 back in the day. My setup takes a big page from running SWGEMU on WSLv1, where I use the Win64 version of MariaDB, and the Apache/PHP is in a Linux Ubuntu distro. The other advantage here is that as my Lenovo PPTP’s into the VPS, the Apache will by default listen on port 80. Which then leads to the whole needing to set security on the headers to allow the http to become a seamless https.
I also can have multiple things listening on different ports, just as I use haproxy again locally to split out the utzoo site onto the old Apache server with all the re-write rules, and then finally to the Windows NT 4.0 workstation with the Altavista Personal desktop search.
Windows 10 performance with the blog
The overall performance on this low end Xeon E3-1225 v2 is quite acceptable.
WSLv1 processes are directly exposed.
As I had mentioned WSLv1 being a subsystem means that the processes are transparent so task-manager can immediately show yo what is going on. The opaqueness of Virtual Machines just adds to the time to identify any issues.
And all it takes is a scheduled task to dump the MariaDB, and run an xcopy onto my OneDrive, and now I’ve got a cloud backup. No plugins needed, no scripts that will break as cloud API’s are forever being depreciated and changing. Very nice!
I do like the flexibility of this being a somewhat simple setup. Not to mention being able to have more than one WSL container for various applications, being able to go so far as to break my Apache setup into multiple instances, all being ‘l7 routed’ through an instance of haproxy either at home, or in the VPS is very nice.
Oh, sure I could mess with self signed certs, and trust myself but I just didn’t want to deal with the overhead of double encryption. Maybe it’s something I’ll revisit later.
Also sorry for the ads. 2024 is starting out…. interesting.
I don’t know how the other various linux distros handle this but I found this by accident:
Nov 17 12:04:25 ukweb pppd[4943]: Using interface ppp0
Nov 17 12:04:25 ukweb pppd[4943]: Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/pts/0
Nov 17 12:04:25 ukweb pptpd[4942]: GRE: Bad checksum from pppd.
Nov 17 12:04:25 ukweb systemd-udevd[4944]: Using default interface naming scheme 'v249'.
Nov 17 12:04:25 ukweb pppd[4943]: peer from calling number 1.1.1.1.1 authorized
Nov 17 12:04:25 ukweb pppd[4943]: MPPE 128-bit stateless compression enabled
Nov 17 12:04:27 ukweb systemd-networkd[592]: ppp0: Link UP
Nov 17 12:04:27 ukweb systemd-networkd[592]: ppp0: Gained carrier
Nov 17 12:04:27 ukweb pppd[4943]: found interface br0 for proxy arp
Nov 17 12:04:27 ukweb pppd[4943]: local IP address 192.168.0.1
Nov 17 12:04:27 ukweb pppd[4943]: remote IP address 192.168.23.10
Nov 17 12:05:28 ukweb systemd[1]: Stopping PoPToP Point to Point Tunneling Server...
Nov 17 12:05:28 ukweb pppd[4943]: Terminating on signal 15
Nov 17 12:05:28 ukweb pppd[4943]: Connect time 1.1 minutes.
Nov 17 12:05:28 ukweb pppd[4943]: Sent 0 bytes, received 6937 bytes.
Nov 17 12:05:28 ukweb systemd-networkd[592]: ppp0: Link DOWN
Nov 17 12:05:28 ukweb systemd-networkd[592]: ppp0: Lost carrier
With the emphasis on “local IP address 192.168.0.1”. Which is *NOT* in my config. I went as far as adding a bridge to satisfy the proxy arp! Netplan is some yaml thing and yeah not a big fan.
And then I found it after doing what i should have done, and grep around to find out that pptpd.conf should actually live in /etc
Yeah that’s right, there is 2 of them although they should be the same. A symlink and a restart later, and now I get this:
Nov 17 12:19:56 ukweb kernel: [ 112.718861] PPP MPPE Compression module registered
Nov 17 12:19:56 ukweb pppd[1002]: MPPE 128-bit stateless compression enabled
Nov 17 12:19:58 ukweb systemd-networkd[599]: ppp0: Link UP
Nov 17 12:19:58 ukweb systemd-networkd[599]: ppp0: Gained carrier
Nov 17 12:19:58 ukweb pppd[1002]: found interface br0 for proxy arp
Nov 17 12:19:58 ukweb pppd[1002]: local IP address 192.168.23.1
Nov 17 12:19:58 ukweb pppd[1002]: remote IP address 192.168.23.10
MUCH much better. I don’t know if this is anything worth wriging about, but if I can save someone else an hour of wondering why the config isn’t working and why their pptp is always defaulting to 192.168.0.1 and why it’s wreaking havoc with any default home router, where here it is.
So it’s the END OF THE WORLD, and sadly that means that all the old media of the 1st gen ‘rich’ web experence is all gone with the long end of Adobe flash. At one point Flash was not only ubiquitious but all sponsored a C/C++ compiler but that stuff sadly won’t work.
So yeah, sad. However, check out ruffle! Naturally it’s a chromium extension, but everything is chrome now so it’ll work fine. It plays many of the early flash type stuff with little to no issues!
Currently Ruffle only supports games written in ActionScript 1 and 2. This includes all games before 2006 and only some games released later.
Currently Ruffle only supports games written in ActionScript 1 and 2. This includes all games before 2006 and only some games released later.
Unfortunately, your content was using Actionscript 3, which Ruffle does not yet support.
It’s hard to think it’s been over 20 years since the whole ‘eStudio‘ thing, but it’s cute to keep it going. Although we are at the point where you can run Windows 2000 in javascript so there is that brute force path…
(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
Pleased to announce WRP version 4.5.2. This is just a bug fix release however it also contains two frequently requested features:
UI customization via HTML template file. This has been requested by many users and it makes total sense. To use it download wrp.html from github, place in the same directory as wrp binary and edit to your liking. WRP will load built-in version if file is not present.
This should enable easy development of more modern UI for never browsers. Potentially with JS and CSS. Please send PR if you make something!
Second most frequently asked feature – re-capture (retake?) of a screenshot without page reload. For example if the page did not capture correctly or if something is changing on the page.
I have also updated Docker Hub and gcr.io repos.
Sun IPX using WRP at VCF West
As usual please test and report bugs!
The next update will focus on issues with page size, viewport and rendering full length pages (h=0) which is currently very broken.
Seriously, the sad thing is that they wasted all their time, and bandwidth. The good thing is that PHP7 is far better at this, than PHP5. I know it’s not hipster neaveaux but PHP7 is really awesome stuff.
I didn’t wake up to a million messages about being down, rather a look at what was going on showed me this:
Obviously something is up.
I checked Cloudflare:
All those hits, and no change in user traffic. So I’m not popular.
And it’s all from the United States. Going back to WordPress I can see it’s mostly from one user!
A look through the 30MB log, and it’s a broken site scrape
This is just terrible you are quoting the link to the link, having slashes going every which way. What the heck!? Don’t be a jerk, pace the thing, why are you trying to DOS it? While my hosting is clearly not robust, why can’t you wait a few seconds between each query? Also look at the output and URL’s it’s sending it’ll never work!
