Everyone seems to be losing their minds over the Windows XP Professional Key

algorithm being cracked.

But of course, how does that help me?

Unironically, I had purchased this for a whopping £4.68

No, really here’s the receipt. What a bargain!

Of course this is a legit copy with a legit key. But the online activation servers are all gone, and it looks like I’d have to call someone asking about my 22 year old copy of Windows, that I’ll load up and quickly forget.

Since I’m going to use QEMU, 0.90 with pcap support I thought I’d share the startup options:

set loopback=\Device\NPF_{3DF0EC5D-7FBE-46DF-ACF8-EF5D8679A473}
set vmnet1=\Device\NPF_{3BC364F4-5A15-405D-926C-C594383F0323}
qemu -m 512 -L pc-bios ^
-hda xphome.vmdk ^
-soundhw es1370 ^
-net nic,model=pcnet,macaddr=52:24:00:33:00:01 ^
-net pcap,devicename=%loopback% ^
%1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6

I had high hopes for this thing. Clearly misplaced ambitions.

First up, it’s an upgrade version. So that means instead of installing XP I had to waste my time installing NT Workstation 3.51, then installing XP. Yuck. And of course it just want small FAT disks of the 2/4 gigabyte boundary type as it’s 1994. Not the bright future of 2002’s Windows XP.

I don’t know why Qemu 0.90 has issues with XP detecting the CD-ROM drive, but yeah that sucked. I wanted to load up some more insane SNA experiments, but there is no DLC / 802.2 driver for XP Home. wow.

At least once it’s satisfied, we can format the disk as one big happy partition, and we can get on with our lives.

Installation is rather uneventful, however we are instantly reminded that we have only 30 days to go. Since we have that nasty CD-ROM issue that means shutting down, and booting back up, but with this fun program on an ISO image, xp_activate.

I did try to make a call, to activate my Windows, but the connection was terrible and I’m not even sure if these numbers were right. No I mean I know they didn’t work.

So I did what all legit users end up doing, using the crack for my 21 year old copy of Windows.

And just a few clicks later, it was done.

Windows XP Home is activated.

I don’t know if it’s even really going to last, I didn’t try anything else, actually I already deleted it. And the XP folio is back on the bookshelf.

Not only is there no DLC, did you know you can’t uninstall TCP/IP? At least you can unbind it from your NIC. While it does have IPX/SPX there is no built in Netware client. When they said HOME they meant it!

Macintosh Application Environment (Failure pt 1)

It’s a rainy day, and I didn’t feel well enough to wander around outside, and check out the ‘spyware street lights’. Although that’s the latest rage at the moment along with the usual stuff.

Instead I thought it’d be fun to try some ‘undercover’ software like that time when Apple thought it would be a good idea to port the ToolBox to Unix and run it as a competitor to programs like SoftPC as people with $30,000 workstations clearly needed a virtual Macintosh.

So I spent way too much time letting my 2006 Mac Pro grind out a Solaris 2.6 install, and then using the latest Tenox dump on archive.org I installed MAE 2.0! For anyone wondering the actual serial number is: 192c4838330166201b

And after serializing the app, and running it, I get a nice kernel panic. I thought I was playing it safe by opting out of the kernel module stuff as I don’t care about reading MacOS formatted diskettes.

I guess I really need Solaris 2.4 and those weird patches.

Internet Explorer. For Unix. Really.

Meanwhile you can rest assured that Internet Explorer 5.0 loads up just fine. It is painfully slow, but there it is. I was even able to download stuff with my ‘http backdoor’ thing to vpsland. So at least that works.

Hard to imagine a time that Microsoft was going cross platform under Gates, but Internet Explorer 3/4/5 were available on MacOS & OS X, with 4&5 under Solaris and HP/UX. Then of course there was that SUN Java lawsuit and they pulled the rug out from interoptability. Although I was a Linux on SPARC user in this era, having it available on Linux would have helped a LOT, but naturally Microsoft didn’t entertain that Linux market thing as it was cancer to them. Meanwhile Chromium Edge is only a Windows / OS X thing.

I was hoping to go further, but it appears not today.

Escargo the replacement MSN messenger network

Microsoft has had a long tradition of wanting to be cool and edgy, and copying what is popular to make themselves a metwo company.  And it’s really random, some things become wildly popular, while others crash and burn so hard that almost all existence of it happening is destroyed.  Back before the commercialization of the internet, if you wanted to do real-time conversations you used IRC, and before then it was just talk/ytalk on any UNIX host.

However once the internet opened up, companies were free to invent their own protocols, and let the users choose if they wanted something more rich than a simple text based protocol, it may seem obvious today, but users wanted to do things like share files, and more importantly be able to minimize the program and only get an alert if someone was actually messaging them.  Out of the gates of commercialization the big hit was ICQ.  And Microsoft being Microsoft, first created Comic Chat, a simplified IRC client back in 1996 as part of it’s push with Internet Explorer 3, which brought many internet programs to Windows, including a NNTP client, and a simple SMTP/POP email client.  Then in 1999 the MSN group brought out their MSN messenger.

With the later massive misstep of buying Skype from Ebay, Microsoft shuttered the MSN messaging product, and has been trying very hard to shoehorn Skype as not only a communication tool for users, but also for businesses.  Apparently they are going to try to copy slack now for us business users.

Back around 2002, when MSN was integrated in with things like ME and XP, I found some server implementation on one of our internal servers.  I think it was written in either Perl or python, and I just recall it definitely ran on one of our Linux boxes with a MySQL back end.  At the time we wanted a private server to keep internal communications internal, and MSN was convenient as everyone had it, and all they needed was a registry change to tell MSN to use the internal server.  Oh how times have changed.

Over on Escargot, it’s even easier to download a pre-patched client,  then create your account and login!

All alone

And just like that I’m logged in using MSN 7.5.0324 English on Windows 10.

Even better is that the source to Escargot is available!

If anyone feels the need to find me, you’ll know where, naturally you’ll have to type in that crazy long domain name….

Need Windows XP with IE 6?

Of course you do!

For a while Microsoft was offering VM’s configured for various platforms for download, but they have cut out both XP and IE7.  However the links have been collected, and can be downloaded here:

https://gist.github.com/zmwangx/e728c56f428bc703c6f6

The VMWare VM’s run fine on Windows even though they are named for OSX, although I did have to add in a NIC to the VMX.  It’s a great way to use a quick & disposable Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10 machines.  Although there isn’t a IE 7 for Windows XP, it’s trivial to upgrade XP / IE 6 to IE 7.

 

Retro computing for $99

So I was cruising around New Capital Computer Plaza, looking for some cisco console cables, and I saw a bunch of old Xeon desktop computers for sale.  Prices were in the 250-500 USD range, which seemed pricey to me.  And keeping in mind that my desktop is already a Xeon E3-1230, it did seem kind of pointless.  But then I saw this Dell Precision 490 for about $99 USD.

Dell Precision 490

Dell Precision 490

Great, so what are the general specs?

Well the ‘nice’ thing about Dell is that they keep all their old stuff online, so looking at the specsheet we can see It’s not a bad machine for something circa 2006.  Even archive.org has the old pricing online too!

Mine came with a Xeon 5160, 8GB of ram, 250 GB disk, and an ATI HD 4850

  • Dell Precision Workstation 490 Desktop – 32bit $2,852
  • Dual Core Intel® Xeon® Processor 5160 3.00GHz, 4MB L2,1333 [add $930]
  • 4GB, DDR2 SDRAM FBD Memory, 533MHz, ECC (4 DIMMS) [add $570]
  • 4GB, DDR2 SDRAM FBD Memory, 533MHz, ECC (4 DIMMS) [add $570]
  • 250GB SATA 3.0Gb/s,7200 RPM NCQ Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst Cache™ [add $90]

By my calculations this machine was about $5,012 USD, and that isn’t including the after market video card, which would be about $180 USD when it was new in 2008, bringing the total MSRP on this thing to $5,192 USD!

Of course it is now 2016, and this machine is 10 years old, with an 8 year old video card.  Also of interest is that it came licensed for Windows XP x64, which was the first publicly available AMD64 OS from Microsoft.  Unlike traditional Windows XP, this 64bit version is actually built around Windows server 2003.

The computer came with a pirated copy of Windows 7, which I wanted to promptly remove.  I have an old MSDN copy of Windows XP x64 that I wanted to install, however the optical drive is broken, and I needed to install from USB.  Thankfully even though this machine is old, it can boot from USB devices.  The first step was to download WinSetupFromUSB 1.2 to get XP onto a USB stick.  Naturally once I had booted from USB, the disk controller wasn’t supported.  The BIOS screen revealed that it was a:

Serial ATA AHCI BIOS, Version iSrc 1.02.25 07222007. Copyright (c) 2003-2006 Intel Corporation. Copyright (c) 2003-2006 Dell, Inc. Controller …

This translated into the Intel iaStor product, and I was able to slipstream in the last version from 2009, 8.9.0.123 into the USB by using nlite.

I have to say that once I had removed the gratuitous pirated Chinese Windows 7, and installed XP that this machine was pretty damned snappy!  As always I updated to service pack 2.

The onboard NIC is a Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx gigabit NIC, which unlike the ‘gigabit’ nic on my newer desktop, this one actually works at 1Gb.

With Windows XP installed, I went to the AMD/ATI site, and found the download for the HD 4xxx series, and went ahead and installed Steam.

I have to say that Half-Life 2 runs GREAT.  According to it’s onboard FPS counter I was getting anywhere around 60-180 FPS.  Pretty awesome.  Fallout 3 runs pretty snappy too.  I tried Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and much to my surprise this vintage 2011 game runs on my 2006 Windows XP x64 setup.

What about the overall internet experience?  Well this being Windows XP, You are pretty limited by the traditional browsers.  Internet Explorer 6 is the default browser which to say it’s dated is an understatement.  I prefer Internet Explorer 7 over 6, but they are both so old it doesn’t matter. Internet Explorer 8 is also an option.  The last version of Google Chrome to support Windows XP was 49.0.2623.75.  Chrome 49 plays youtube just fine, Scripted Amiga is a little pokey, but does run.

And how does this thing compare to my normal desktop?  Running Geekbench 2, I get a score of 3396 vs 10864.  Now keep in mind this $99 machine only has a dual core processor, while my newer machine has a quad core + hyper threading CPU.  An interesting comparison is with the Xeon E5320 CPU, with the Dell eking out a victory.

Installing additional software was possible via Virtual Clone Drive, while I did have ISO images of stuff I’ve had physical media of in the past, a broken drive wasn’t going to help me read anything.

I didn’t activate it, but Windows 10 will run on this machine as well.  I’ll probably upgrade by getting a second JD210 heat sink (I already found another 5160 processor for $10)

It’s a great machine for sub $100.  I’d hate to have spent over $5,000 on this thing, but it’s kind of cool to see that a 10 year old machine like this can still be sort of usable.  Of course updating the software will certainly go a long way in making it really usable.

Installing Microsoft Java on Windows 2000 SP4

So yeah, I’m using some old crap software, and it wants MS Java. Great. Ive installed Windows 2000 + SP4, IE6, and then to install MS Java and I get this error:

protected system component?

protected system component?

The Microsoft VM you are attempting to install is a protected system component and can only be updated with a later release of the operating system or service pack.

Well as far as I know, msjavx86-5.0.3810.0 is the last release of MS Java, so what to do?

Apparently all you have to do is rename it to ‘msjavwu.exe’ and it’ll install.

MS Java on IE6

MS Java in action

And there we go, Microsoft Java is working.

Thanks to the java test site that I’ve used over the years:

http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA012735/applet/applets_en.htm

modern.ie Virtual Machines

(this is a guest post by Tenox)

Ran across this curiosity today: Microsoft Edge Dev Center provides a bunch of ready made virtual machines with different versions of IE web browser. But they can be used for different purposes if you need to quickly spin up a specific version of Windows quickly.

http://dev.modern.ie/tools/vms/windows/

This is whats available:

modeirnie1Different hypervisor type images on Windows, Mac and Linux are available:

modeirnie3Very handy stuff. This is beloved Windows XP after it booted first time:
modeirnie2Very handy and not only for browser testing.

There also is a Remote IE which opens IE window straight from Azure. I wonder what are implications of it for censorship in some countries as well as piracy etc.

Playing around with Gopher

virtuallyfun gopher

My Gopher Site, via proxy

Back in the day, if you were ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ and had a UNIX shell account back in 1993 there was this cool way of getting around various computer systems around the world called gopher.  What was really cool, is that it offered search services, indexing and even gateways into various libraries (where they kept physical books) where you could search their card catalogs for various tomes you were looking for.

Some colleges even had various services that you could connect to, offering things like news, weather and whatnot.  It was pretty neat, however there was one stumbling block, which is gopher was a VERY controlled environment, where most universities locked their client to only starting at one particular gopher server, and to get anywhere else you had to memorize an insane number of keystrokes that would make 1800 operators go crazy.  Also there was nothing like virtual hosting, so the idea of having your own gophersite was most likely out of the question.  The other issue is that the University of Minnesota, where boombox resided (the master gopherserver) saw they had something good going, and unlike UCB’s CSRG which gave BSD away for free, they were going to license the server for $100 for a educational institution, and $500 for a commercial institution.

Needless to say, this CERN thing called HTTP which they were trying to distance themselves from, which wanted no money for became the next big thing, and with the freedom and ease of setting up website, gopher became a ghost of the past.

But as the world was starting to build web clients, many understood gopher, including Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.  Although starting with version 7 (gopher was also disabled with some updates in IE6), gopher has since been removed.  But thanks to the Utilu IE Collection, and this quick registry setting you too can surf gopher space with IE 4.0 (or 5,5.5..) like it’s the mid 1990s.

My gopher site via IE 4.0

My gopher site via IE 4.0

So needless to say with a client in hand, I wanted to setup my own server.  And keeping with it being old, I decided to use the old 2.3.1 gopher server.  I also compiled it with freeWAIS support, although I haven’t quite worked out how to get that fully working right now.  Compiling this stuff on 32bit i386 Linux was trivial to say the least, but if you need binaries or anything they are here.

the next thing was to get both wais, and gopherd running from xinetd, which was easy once I knew how.  These are the service files I created:

service gopher
{
socket_type = stream
protocol = tcp
wait = no
user = gopher
server = /usr/local/etc/gopherd
server_args = -I -l /var/log/gopherd.log -u gopher /gopher-data 70
instances = 20
}

And for wais:

service wais
{
socket_type = stream
protocol = tcp
wait = no
user = root
server = /usr/local/bin/waisserver
server_args = -d /gopher-data/wais /gopher-data/wais.log -l 10 -p 210
instances = 20
}

Easy, right?

Gopher likes to be a named service, so I went with my virtuallyfun.com domain, as it is easier to type.  I guess I could have gone with gopher.superglobalmegacorp.com but that is… LONG. Another cool thing is that there are several gopher proxies out there for HTTP only people, so you can also get to my gopher page here (via gopher.floodgap.com).

The harder part was figuring out how the directory mapping works, but luckily there was enough in the test directory to get something working, changing this

ls

About decode-n-scripts install mspl tmp
bin ftp-horrors lib pids

Into this:

The old UNIX gopher client

The old UNIX gopher client

The secret is all in the .names and .Links files.  The .names file will map a directory name to something more pleasing, such as changing mspl to the “Microsoft Programmer’s Libary”.

Path=./mspl
Name=Microsoft Programmer’s Library

Easy, right?

And the .Links file creates links to various content, from a telnet example (to my bbs….)

Type=8
Name=QemuOS/2 BBS (My BBS!)
Host=bbs.superglobalmegacorp.com
Port=23
Numb=100
Abstract=My Synchronet BBS running on OS/2 inside of Qemu! #100
Path=

To another gopher system

Name=My lame SDF.org site
Type=1
Host=sdf.org
Port=70
Path=/users/jsteve
Abstract=My personal SDF gopherspace (itsucks) #-11
Numb=-11

To even doing some crude ascii art!

Name= # # # ##### ##### # # ## # # # #
Type=3
Path=
Numb=5
#
Name= # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
Type=3
Path=
Numb=6

.. and so on.

So yes, to be difficult, all the links in this post are gopher:// links. I don’t know if that’ll deter the likes of any self proclaimed virus scanner king, but I’d like to think that his poorly constructed automated tests will be unable to connect to gopher resources.

Now if I can figure out how to setup my own jughead or veronica to search my own wais of information, that’d be excellent.

If I had the virtual space I’d host the whole thing on a virtual VAX…. or something equally insane.  Word is Shoebill just got ethernet support, so running my gopher space on A/UX would be cool.

Virtual Machines for Internet Explorer

Collect them all?

Collect them all?

Something I kind of stumbled on, while playing ‘Escape from XP‘, a MS page with a tonne of virtual machines!

With downloads for Windows, Mac & Linux!

Up until now, I have been using Utilu’s IECollection (local mirror).

So this may be of interest to some of you, but there is XP, Vista, & Windows 7 downloads….

Escape from XP

Escape from XP

Meanwhile, try to escape from XP!

Microsoft Java

J++

I’ve been meaning to write something about the whole Microsoft foray into the Java language, and where we are today as a result. I know in 2012 it is hard to imagine a world where Java wasn’t just ignored or marginalized (don’t even pretend that Oracle buying out SUN didn’t drive people away) but rather there was a lot of excitement built around Java, and all the language companies were getting behind Java.  Yes this included Borland, and of course Microsoft.  And not to be left out of making a compiler, but Microsoft also wrote their own JVM, or Java virtual machine runtime.  Even more un Microsoft like, is that they provided Internet Explorer and their java on the Macintosh!

“Microsoft is offering a real Mac program at an incredibly attractive price: free. Plus, it comes with a few nifty tools you won’t find at http://www.netscape.com/: A good Java virtual machine and just-in-time compiler, which allows you to run Java applets anywhere, not just in your browser, and even a small but robust Web server.”MacWEEK “Microsoft may have won the browser war”

Joanna Pearlstein February 28, 1997

In this brief period of cross platforming products, Microsoft also had Internet explorer for the SUN, and HP workstations (Solaris/HPUX).Even back in 1997 – 1998 Microsoft was going strong on Java, to the point they were re-writing their website to use as much java/javascript as possible, they had even created DHTML the underpinnings for what we call AJAX today.  Microsoft however didn’t capitalize a new server platform and branding for their J++, but rather relied on NT 4.0 and IIS.  Not that this was ‘bad’ or unexpected, but notice that they considered this a lesson learned in marketing and pushed for a .net server although the car people had their win to rename it to 2003.The other thing of course, was that from the 1.0 to 1.1 specification of Java, Microsoft didn’t wait for SUN to fix the language, they instead took it upon themselves to do so, and of course added in lots of Windows only functionality. This of course led to the protracted lawsuit that won Sun a nice chunk of cash, and pushed Microsoft out of the Java business. Not to have had all that effort wasted, Microsoft then took the JVM and retooled it into the .net platform that we all know and love today.  And while SUN was busy trying to make Java the new business COBOL, Microsoft has been making the .net platform business cobol, by letting people choose what language they wish to use, even… COBOL (from Fujitsu IIRC).Installing J++

So on the weekend I came across this book on “Web programming” which I’d usually laugh at for being obsolete and ignore, but it proudly mentions that the included CD includes the ‘publishers’ version of J++ 1.0!  So I checked the book, and yes the CD is still there! So for the 2-3 people that care, I even packaged this fifteen year old oddity. It’s demanding requirements are NT 4.0, or Windows 95 with sixteen (Yes sixteen!) megabytes of ram, and 100MB of free disk space.  Personally I just installed it in a blank NT 4.0 unpatched VM. It’ll install IE 3 along with it, and version 1.00.6211 of the Microsoft JVM.

Naturally even emulated, on a 3Ghz CPU with a gigabytes worth of RAM it runs and compiles quite quickly.

Hello!

I know it isn’t much  to look at, and the download is small it is quite neat for the age/size… But yes, even ‘modern’ java can run “well behaved” J++ apps..

Running my J++ 1.0 hello program

As part of the trial though Microsoft had to pull everything with the JVM in it, and that included IE 3.0 “full”, 4.0 and 5.0/5.5 .. Even Windows 2000 sp3, and prior had to go.  Yes this is also why Office 97 & SQL 7 are gone from the MSDN downloads.  Maybe its my nostalgia but I really did like the 1997-1998 era and their applications.  The only reason I “upgraded” out of Outlook 98 was that 2003 can connect to Exchange 2003/2007 servers with a built in HTTP connection so I don’t have to VPN to send/receive email.

I nearly forgot about this ancient page with some applettes. Amazingly they still run.. Since my experience with Java has been largely write once, debug everywhere…