I know this is a weird one. I got handed a backup of a broken VM and have to fix it. I was given a vma file which of course you basically need a Proxmox machine to use the vma command to unpack it.
Luckily you can happily install Proxmox into a VM that can’t properly run Proxmox, but it’ll give access to the utility to extract it.
It’s pretty self-explanatory other than the ‘tmp’ directory to extract to mustn’t exist. Weird.
Ok the first thing is those raw files are ENORMOUS. Convert them to a better container, I went with vmdk because … reasons.
qemu-img convert -f raw -O vmdk disk-drive-sata0.raw disk-drive-sata0.vmdk
qemu-img convert -f raw -O vmdk disk-drive-sata1.raw disk-drive-sata1.vmdk
I then could copy the VMDK’s to my machine and then destroy the Proxmox VM.
Since I’m weird I’m going to do this on Windows, using the Win64 port of Qemu. Because, why not? Also, I’m going to setup a different NAT network, and some port redirect:
So, I managed to keep the virtio network device, bind it to a DHCP network of 192.168.1.0/24 with the first address starting at 192.168.1.10. I also redirect port 8080 to port 80, along with 8022 to 22, allowing basic HTTP & SSH access into the VM.
The weird requirement is the 2 SATA disks, where the 2nd disk is the bootable one. I don’t know why it was configured this way, but I just preserved it.
I had to reset the root password, so this was a bit weird as I had to clear so much nonsense of the boot setup, basically pruning everything after ro, to add “rd.break enforcing=0”
With that, it was a matter of mounting the /sysroot as readwrite, chrooting into it, and then setting the password. yay.
Now I can reboot the VM on my desktop and have it running on Qemu, where I could bring up the WebUI for the mystery product and have it all running as a tame user mode application.
Nice!
The CLI syntax is always evolving and getting complex but don’t give up hope!
(this is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
I often need to install a specific / older version of QEMU on a Mac using Homebrew. If you search for how to do it, typical answers are create a local tap, extract some files and other nonsense. Building from sources is equally retarded because configure can’t easily find includes and libraries installed by Homebrew.
This is how to do it in a simplest possible way. Find QEMU Homebrew Formula file on Github. Then click history on the top right corner. Browse for the desired version. Then on the right of the version, click a little icon saying “View code at this point”. It should show you an older version of the same formula. You can click download raw file or copy the URL and use curl to fetch it. Then simply run brew install ~/Downloads/qemu.rb or wherever you saved it. Magic! Hope it helps!
First off, I got a new VPS to house this on, size wise, I’d just plain outgrown the old one, even with SquashFS. Over on lowend box, I had spotted this one: LuxVPS
It’s not an AD, just thought the pricing seemed pretty good for 5€. One of the nice things about converting so much of my data to SquashFS is that moving single files is WAY easier to deal with!
Mice in my 1970’s teletype text editor?!
Using Mice with a 1970’s text editor
But editing text files had me facing off some feature of VIM I’d somehow not dealt with that Debian 11 set by default, and that is mouse integration!
CAN YOU BELIVE IT?
Somewhere out there, is people who use a mouse with a VI clone.
It bares repeating
SOMEONE THINKS YOU NEED A MOUSE TO USE VI.
So much so, it’s the system default.
Good lord.
The fix is to edit /etc/vim/vimrc:
set mouse=
set ttymouse=
Problem solved. Obviously, I’m not going to remember this, but now I can right click/paste the way G’d intended it!
Stale encryption
Old rusty locks
The next source of annoyance is the ancient stunnel 4.17 that I use for altavista.superglobalmegacorp.com. I’m kind of trapped with this setup as it needs to be a 32bit ‘workstation’ OS, and I don’t want to run something as heavy as XP or Vista when NT 4.0 is more than enough. Anyways OpenSSL won’t talk to this ancient encryption, throwing this error trying to do a connection with “openssl s_client -connect 192.168.23.6:443”:
error:1425F102:SSL routines:ssl_choose_client_version:unsupported protocol
Unable to establish SSL connection.
Now when I connect to stunnel, I can verify that I am indeed using ancient crap level security:
New, SSLv3, Cipher is AES256-SHA
Server public key is 1024 bit
Secure Renegotiation IS NOT supported
Compression: NONE
Expansion: NONE
No ALPN negotiated
SSL-Session:
Protocol : TLSv1
Cipher : AES256-SHA
Session-ID: 19D20D30E0026E8417E00402DE939E90770D4658C3A9CFE4DB4E5F2A5454DE9D
Session-ID-ctx:
Master-Key: 498C648E77E9B9C944A8B1D16242240A161A05A087881C6AD300718DD9B8C443EA12FB76440B666B7C6634A7E7DBE9D5
PSK identity: None
PSK identity hint: None
SRP username: None
Start Time: 1718352960
Timeout : 7200 (sec)
Verify return code: 10 (certificate has expired)
Extended master secret: no
---
DONE
I don’t care about the encryption, I could as a matter of fact just run without it, as I only need the reverse proxy aspect of it, to make the AltaVista web server accessible over the LAN/WAN/INTERNET. It’s all fronted with CloudFlare so from the end use POV it’s all encrypted anyways
A rainbow of happiness
Sunshine & rainbows!
Another nice side benefit of this SquashFS setup is that I can forever rebase the disks as the content never changes.
One thing is for sure, it makes hosting AltaVista a bit easier to deal with. And for the sake of archiving, I uploaded a pre-loaded & indexed dataset Altavista Pre-Loaded (squashfs). I found that you can just copy the databases into a new VM, as long as you keep the drive letters the same as your source. So luckily, I had kept the OS on C:, installed AltaVista on D: with all the usenet posts on U:. Even better, for those strapped for space, you don’t technically need the U: drive, if you just want to search. Of course, you probably do want to look at them, but we’ve gone down this road before. And we know where it leads.
In the previous posts, we’ve gone through the excruciating fun of installing Rhapsody DR2, and of course built the Rhapsody kernel from source. But now it’s time to build the software that can build software.
Enter the apt*
Of course we can’t just start building apt, rather we need to start at the 1990’s super star scripting language that revolutionized massive, shared code libraries, accelerating web development, and building the modern web, of course I’m talking about PERL.
Even back in the original effort building Perl was a slog. Even with temporary wins with miniperl it quickly fell apart from missing symbols. When it comes to the system libraries Darwin is not complete, rather it’s a lot of amputations from OPENSTEP. Which of course, itself was amputated from NeXTSTEP. I’m not sure what held back NeXTSTEP from being ‘open’ back when ‘open’ meant published specifications, not open source, or open in any other sense of the way, like The Open Group being a gatekeeping organization that is NOT open at all.
Anyways, Perl from the Darwin 0.1 downloads & the 0.3 CD-ROM don’t build. I gave up and moved to the OS X Server version and that one did build! As much as I could diff them out and find the breaking difference, honestly, it’s just easier to stick with what works.
/pub/Darwin/PublicSource/Darwin
I should point out that the source to Darwin was preserved on this now defunct site “next.68k.org”, which in turn was also preserved on the defunct site “nextftp.onionmixer.net“. Amazing how mirrors go. Other fun things on the ftp site include MacOSX-Server public sources, which did include the Perl that we built.
Darwin 0.3
Darwin 0.3 however was pressed onto CD-ROM, and distributed out to the masses. It took me a short while to get a tip to a hidden server that had a copy, which really was a massive breakthrough as it had a far more complete set of files than the 0.1 ftp dump. However at the same time there are files in the 0.1 dump that are not in the 0.3. Was there ever a 0.2? I have no idea, the mailing lists don’t seem to have been preserved so I really don’t know. Does anyone have any other ftp site archives? Not to my knowledge but I’d be more than happy to be wrong.
With a working Perl the next thing to do is to patch the buildtools & dpkg to not be PowerPC centric. It’s no secret that all the official effort going on was to get OpenSTEP up and running on Apple PowerPC’s and to transition away from OPENSTEP to Rhapsody, the MacOS 8 Platinum feeling type OS, where everyone was going to love the ‘Coca’ API, and dump the old MacOS stuff or be forced to run it in the ‘BlueBox’ MacOS 8 emulator. Obviously this future didn’t happen as developers were not interested in rewriting for Steve’s decade+ fever dream of a Unix for the ‘rest of us’, instead they wanted their existing software to ‘just work’ and the Carbon API had to be created, along with a drastically different and modern looking OS X.
Frequently in the build tools it’s a matter of looking for ppc/powerpc and replacing them with i386. It’s really no surprise that Darwin always built on intel, and it had to, as it’s life depended on it. Back when NeXT hit their first real big stumbling blocks of being a vertical platform is that they just couldn’t compete in the hardware space. But dumping the 68k based black boxes, they could now take their software and port it to the much more coveted RISC platforms, and shipping with NeXTSTEP 3.3 they supported both SPARC & HPPA. There had always been talks of further platforms like MIPS or DEC Alpha, but these never materialized, much like the i860 which had been relegated to a simple Postscript co-processor.
Anyways.. Keeping with yesterday’s setup, and of course the .darwin-builder-04-23-2024.iso CD-ROM with all the stuff we need, let’s DOIT!
phase 2 completed
With phase 3 completed we are now ready to build the rest of the system. I hope you are excited! As I’m sure hoping you kept the original disk layout from the prior setup, or I’ve totally trashed your system by now.
I should say that deb files are just specially tagged ‘ar’ archives, that contain a data & control files telling apt how to process them. In this case I’ve taken the cc_783.1-1_i386-apple-darwin.deb file and modified it to contain the OS X 10.0 modified CC compiler. Apt had stumbled on building it, and I’m not interested into troubleshooting why or how. Basically, use ar to extract the contents of the deb, then tar to expand the data, replace the files, tar to put the files back into the data tar file, and ar to rebuild the archive.
ar r cc_783.1-1_i386-apple-darwin.deb debian-binary control.tar.gz data.tar.gz
In this case, debian-binary is a text file that simply contains ‘2.0’. Amazing!
The first thing to do is build a manifest of what needs to be built. I just simply extract all the ‘fixed’ source that I’d used last time to build Darwin, apply patches were needed, and then kick off the process with a darwin-buildall.
In this case I skip building the C compiler, as it takes too long, and I’ve already done it. If you really want to do it, you can do so at your own leisure. GDB has issues building, and I haven’t even begun to tackle them. As you can guess the format of the manifest is pretty simple:
dir /usr/src/CoreOSMakefiles-1/ all
dir /usr/src/Csu-1/ all
dir /usr/src/Libc-1/ all
dir /usr/src/LibcAT-1/ all
Debian uses deb’s to populate a fake root directory in order to cross compile the packages. This is like installing multiple copies of the operating system, and that is why we use a separate scratch disk. This can consume several gigabytes when it’s done.
Also this presented the chicken/egg problem with how do you make debs from a system that needs debs? Thankfully NCommander had done extensive work with Debian / Canonical and was able to fake enough of a ‘build-base’ fakery that satisfied the build system just enough to start building stuff. In this weird way all roads lead back to the first build-base. Thankfully we live in the future where VMs are fast, and virtual disks are cheap.
I then create the /built directory, where the compiled deb’s will be populated, and copy in my modified compiler Debian into the built directory so that it’s used in all the compiling. On the CD-ROM I have 2 selections of deb files, the ‘deb’ directory from when I’d originally done this back in 2017, and the ‘fresh’ directory that I’ve just built. You can always manually source where the debs some come.
Re-creating the steps from 7 years ago the first phase was to build the Darwin kernel. Like everything else, once you know what is involved, it’s not all that difficult. But as always finding out the steps to get there is half the fun!
I’m going to assume if you want to follow along, that you’ve completed the first part of this exercise, and you have a Rhapsody DR 2 system up and running. Due to some issues I’ve had with creating a lot of files & filesystem corruption, we are going to create and add two more disks to the system. On Qemu we need to add them via the CLI:
Step one is to boot into single user mode. As we need to prep & format the disks under Darwin before the system starts up.
We need to check the hard disk, and then create the device names for the third hard disk.
fsck -y /dev/rhd0a
mount -w /
cd /dev
./MAKEDEV hd2
Now we need to run the ‘disk’ command which will abstract the whole volume creation. There are numerous flags, but we don’t need all that many.
disk -i -l 'src' /dev/rhd1a disk -i -l 'scratch' /dev/rhd2a
The output scrolls off the screen, so I didn’t capture it, but you’ll see all the inodes being created, it’s a lot of output!
With the disks created, we can now shut down the VM
shutdown -h now
and then restart Qemu, and let it boot up normally. We’ll get to the login screen, login as the root user.
The first thing I’d recommend is to drag the Terminal.app from /System/Administration to the desktop to make it easier to get to. Rhapsody, unlike NeXTSTEP & OPENSTEP doesn’t have any dock, as the goal back then was to make Rhapsody look and feel more like Platinum MacOS.
The next thing to do is to make the system very insecure by allowing remote root logins. It’s just easier to deal with. You could use sed or just copy the one I provided from the CD-ROM.
cp /source/ttys /etc
And with that in place, its easy enough to telnet into the VM so you can copy/paste stuff in and out with ease!
You should now be able to verify that all 3 disks are mounted:
# mount | grep hd.a
/dev/hd0a on / (local)
/dev/hd1a on /src (local)
/dev/hd2a on /scratch (local)
From here it should be very simple to kick off the build process:
/source/phase1.sh
And this will kick off the build, recreating all the fun steps I’d gone through so many years ago. These projects now are building in the following order:
kernel-1
driverkit-139.1-1
cc-798
bootstrap_cmds-1
objc-1
The first phase of the script will unpack both the kernel & driverkit and install their respective header files into the OS. NeXT a bunch of symlinks are created to link the system to the driverkit. Next I decided to build the ObjectiveC compiler from 10.0, hoping it’s more bugfixed and slightly more optimized than what was available back in 1999. Building the compiler is a little involved, as a good GCC tradition is to be cross compiled first, then re-compile itself with itself, then do that again and verify that the 3rd recompile outputs the same as the second one. Yes it’s a thing. Yes it’s slow. Yes you are lucky to live in the future, this was really painful back in the day.
With the kernel compiled, we can then compile the bootstrap commands, and the objectiveC runtime that is used by the kernel. Nothing too exciting here.
DriverKit however….
The PCMCIA code was not included in any of the 0.x Darwins, so for laptop enthusiasts you are basically SOL. As a matter of fact, a lot of weird stuff was pruned out, that either could be ‘touched’ or borrowed from the PowerPC port and massaged into place. Luckily I had at least figured out a simple fix for PCIKernBus.h so at least PCI works.
Likewise for the kernel, there was some guessing on the EISA config, which also overlaps ISA, along with having to remove the PCMCIA cardbus .. bus.
APM crash
I had issues with the APM (Advanced Power Management), another laptopisim I suspect. I had to amputate that.
for testing purposes
Naturally the cpuid code is broken much like early NT (I wonder if both were contributed by intel?), so it doesn’t detect any half way modern Pentium processors correctly which causes it to fall all the way back to the i386, which unfortunately, Rhapsody is compiled as 486 (remember NeXTSTEP had fat binaries allowing you to recompile for different processors and ship a single binary that can be ‘lipo’d into the appropriate one for the host). So being degraded to a 386 means nothing works.
bad CPU type in library!
yay.
Luckily patching the cpuid was pretty simple just force it always to be a Pentium. It is 1999 afterall.
I’ve done my best to make this a single script to run, and all being well you’ll get something that looks like errors, but it should be fine?!
System/Library/Frameworks/System.framework/Versions/B/Headers/bsd/i386/table.h
System/Library/Frameworks/System.framework/Versions/B/Headers/bsd/i386/types.h
System/Library/Frameworks/System.framework/Versions/B/Headers/bsd/i386/user.h
System/Library/Frameworks/System.framework/Versions/B/Headers/bsd/i386/vmparam.h
private/
private/dev/
private/dev/MAKEDEV
private/tftpboot/
private/tftpboot/mach_kernel
mach_kernel
tar: private/dev: Could not change access and modification times: Permission denied
tar: private/dev: Cannot change mode to 0755: Permission denied
tar: private/dev: Cannot chown to uid 0 gid 0: Permission denied
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
A quick look around shows that there is tgz files indicating that things have been compiled. I did backup the old original kernel as “rhapsody-gcc.tgz” in case you ever need it. Can’t imagine why but who knows?
You should now be able to reboot into the kernel that you’d compiled!
Next up is Phase 2, where we compile the tools to enter the dark magic that is the Debian build system. Yes, you read that right, Apple/NeXT was all in on Debian.
It’s hard to believe it’s been 7 years ago since I reproduced Ncommander‘s adventure in building the Mach kernel from Darwin 0.1 sources that had been found years ago. At one point we’d managed to build enough of Darwin to do a dump/restore onto a new disk image, and have a mostly built Darwin system save for a hand full of files.
Time goes on by, and memories fade, and I thought it’d be worth going over the adventure, yet again. Just as it was true back then, I thought I’d reproduce the same setup that I’d been using back then. Qemu was a new and exciting thing back then, and
the Disk driver is VERY picky and honestly ancient Qemu is a pretty solid option to emulate NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/Rhapsody with some patches to both 0.8 & 0.9 by Michael Engel, which change a nested interrupt and add support for a busmouse, as the PS/2 mouse doesn’t work for some unknown reason. I know many are scared of old Qemu, but the disk support is pretty solid and the CPU recompilation is very fast, so having to rely on MinGW v3 isn’t so terrible.
While I had hid away a lot of these resources on archive.org, I thought it was best to just go back to the oldest post I had where I had painfully documented how to compile Qemu and get it working with NeXTSTEP, back on BSDnexus. I’m so glad I took the time so long ago to not only write it down, and add screenshots, but also tag the version numbers. Software drift, especially free software can be so difficult to pin down, and it’s nice to be able to return to a known good value. I went ahead and placed the recreated toolchain over on archive.org.
Rhapsody is a weird OS, in that NeXT had kind of given up on the OS market after their NeXT RISC Workstation had basically died with the 88k, and even their early abandoned PowerPC 601 aka MC98000/98601 port. Apple had left a few of the changelogs, in the source code. It’s very interesting stuff! I guess to go off on my own tangent NeXT was just too early, the cube with it’s Unix & magnetic optical media and great audio DSP capabilities was just too ahead of the curve. What the cube couldn’t pull off in 1988, the iMac and OS X sure did in 2001.
I also added UDP support to this Qemu so I could use the HecnetNT bridge trick giving me the ability to telnet/ftp into the VM greatly reducing my pain. Back in the day I had used NFS and the network slirp redirection. But I like having direct access so much more!
Rhapsody throws up yet another fun ‘road block’ in that the mouse buttons map backwards for some reason. It’s a trivial fix in the source code, but I made it a runtime option in case I needed or wanted to run NeXTSTEP. And it was a good thing, as I did need to find the NXLock.h file for building one part of Darwin.
When building Darwin, I started with the last x86 version of NeXTSTEP that was availble, and that was Apple ”Rhapsody” / Titan1U x86 Developer Release 2 from WinWorld. My thinking at the time and still is that the closer you can get your build to whatever they were using as ‘current’ the easier this will be.
Rhapsody can support an 8GB disk, so let’s go with that. This always has an issue with people that try much larger, and just fail, so for my sake and yours let’s just go with 8.
You may be wondering, why only use 128MB of RAM? Well there is a bug in the shipping Rhapsody kernel that prevents booting on machines with more than 192? MB of RAM. Naturally, once we are to the point of building our own kernels this won’t be a problem but for now we are limited.
The bootloader will give us a few seconds to do anything fancy, I just hit -v so I always have the verbose boot.
From here it’s just a few options to go thru the installer
And a disk change is required
CONTROL+ALT+2 will bring up the monitor prompt, where we can change the disk
CONTROL+ALT+1 will return us to the console. Now we have to go through all the SCSI cards, and kind of compatible IDE cards
Further..
Further still…
And how select the Primary/Secondary(DUAL) EIDE/ATAPI Device Controller (v5.01)
We only need the one driver, so we’re good to go!
Continuing onwards will now start the kernel, along with a change to graphical mode. Just like a NeXT!
Now we can confirm again we want to install
As you can see there is our hard disk!
In the future we don’t need to dual boot so, just give it the entire disk.
A few more 1’s and we are finally installing!
Trust me it’s fast on Qemu!
And just like that, we’ve completed the first part of the install.
You can use CONTROL+ALT+2 to toggle back to the monitor and type in
eject fda
to eject the floppy, then it’s CONTROL+ALT+1 to return to the display and have it reboot. Qemu won’t try to boot to the hard disk, and with no disk in the drive, it’ll hang at the BIOS. Now is a good time to close Qemu and backup the hard disk. Mostly because I hate repeating this stuff.
Type in -s for SINGLE USER MODE. This is where a lot of Unix problems got solved in the old days
It’s a little tricky as this does involve typing. As instructed we need to check the hard disk prior to mounting it read/write
run the commands:
fsck -y /dev/rhd0a
mount -w /
Now we can mount the floppy disk
mkdir /mnt
mount /dev/fd0a /mnt
ls /mnt
I’ve included both the kernel & NE2000 driver in one file, and JUST the NE2000 driver in the other. For my sake I use the first one, update.tar.gz as I wanted to use the newer kernel ASAP. tar -zxvf didn’t want to run, so I did a rather awkward version to achieve the same thing.
cat /mnt/update.tar.gz | gzip -dc | tar -xvf -
With the files in place, you can now shut down the system with a simple
shutdown -h now
Once more again, I’d shut down the emulator, and backup the hard disk. If anything goes wrong you can restore your backups at any phase, at least saving some time!
Next is the graphical install. In this case I use the hecnet bridge to give full access, you can setup with the slirp driver with a simple “-net user” but it doesn’t matter at the moment Since I opted for the newer kernel, I can take advantage of the 512MB RAM.
Now we have to setup the hardware. It should be somewhat straight forward, first we start with the monitor. The mouse should be working although I find that I have to move slowly. Sorry it tracks weird on real hardware too.
The Cirrus Logic GD5446 should be detected automatically, I just go with the default 1MB
Next under the mice, select the PS/2 mouse and remove it
This leaves us with the Bus Mouse driver.
Under the network tab, the NE2000 should be automatically detected.
On the last tab, I make a habit of removing the Parallel port freeing IRQ 7, in case I wanted it for something else.
Back to the summary, we now have Cirrus Logic video, NE2k networking, with no SCSI, no Audio.
With the config saved, now we can just install as is. I un-installed Japanese, but it doesn’t matter. You absolutely need the Development Tools, so may as well go with eveything.
The installation only takes a few minutes and we are ready to reboot
The kernel will now shut down.
Once more again this is a great time to make another backup of the hard disk. At this point this is a great backup to save, as we’ve installed the OS, and selected drivers, in the next reboot we’ll be personalizing the operating system.
We can re-run the last config once the disk has been saved. We’ll be greeted with a message that the Server isn’t responding. Answer YES to continue without networking.
From here we are in the Setup Assistant, taking a nod from MacOS 8
I use USA keyboards. The best keyboards! I touch type so I don’t have to deal with weird layouts.
Specify for a LAN connection
There is no DHCP support so specify a manual IP address.
The default stuff is just wrong.
On my LAN this is good enough. DONT add a router. It’ll just confuse it.
We don’t have or want NetInfo. This would be the server to give out IP addresses, and authentication. We don’t need it!
Leave the DNS servers blank
You can setup any location, it doesn’t matter.
Likewise, with NTP, turn it off.
We will then get the option to set the date/time manually. The default time is far too old and it’ll break stuff.
Next up is user accounts.
I always make local accounts.
Come up with some creative name
and a password
I don’t have it doing any automatic login. You can if you want, it’s all up to you, this one doesn’t matter.
Next is an Administrator password
And now we can apply our changes.
It takes seconds!
And now we’ere done. You may want yet another backup as this is tedious!
With the final configured backup in hand, now we can boot back one more time, and now we’re in SVGA mode!
Rhapsody DR2 Login Screen
Logging in as root will give me the desktop
Desktop
And there we are, all installed.
For anyone brave enough to have read all of this, but wants the quick and easy version, it’s up on archive.org!
In part two I’ll pick up with the source CD-ROM I’ve prepared, so we can start compiling Darwin!
The UnixWare 7.1.1 install program has a date & time Y2k problem. And this always ends in whatever licensing you give it to install will expire and be nullified. Luckily this time while re-installing on VMware I saw if you defer the license on install, It’ll grant you a temporary eval license. It’s not going to matter as it’ll immediately expire, but it get’s us past the install.
Qemu however let’s you rev up the time machine and specify a starting time
-rtc base=1999-09-29T15:00:00
As simple as that. I found for installing with Qemu 8.0 (Latest win32) binary it worked well enough like this:
Installation in a stock boring VM goes fine, there is built in support for the AMD PCnet driver, so things ‘just work’. And then on the VMware reboot it never launches X11.
Starting Desktop works fine on Qemu
Under Qemu, I’m greeted by CDE and the login page. On VMware however…
Starting Desktop never starts
I know t his used to work on VMware, but there is some regression in the VESA video driver. The fix was to use scoadmin and knock the video settings down to stock VGA. Luckily I have an X server running on Windows, so I could just export the display and set it up.
Video Configuration on Qemu
Whereas I had to set VMware to VGA:
Video Configuration on VMware
And one more reboot, and I was at least given a graphical console:
Now able to login to VMware graphically
Inputting the licenses
Being a commercial Unix from back in the day, it relies on License Numbers, and activation codes to actually use the software. I have the box, so I have codes so yay me. Post install, I could remove the expired licenses, and then input the ones that were in the box.
These are 5 user licenses, just enough to show off the system, I suppose: The advanced features of the day are nothing special these days, but it’s nice to have the PCC derived compiler, if not to compile GCC but more so for SYSV code from back in the day.
Networking
Networking for VMware is straightforward, I use the NAT interface VMnet8 that is installed by default, selecting a valid Tcp/IP address on the interface range gives me not only full internet access, but also allows me to easily telnet into the VM.
I had been using the user mode SLiRP code for ages, but after all the MIT PC/IP fun, I was thinking I bet modern Qemu supports UDP transport for network traffic, and that it’d just integrate with HecnetNT just fine. And it does!
Configuring the HetnetNT bridge was simple, as always make sure you have Wireshark/pcapng installed and simply run ethlist to get the list of interfaces:
D:\qemu>ethlist.exe
Network devices:
Number NAME (Description)
0 \Device\NPF_{E79F6278-3E7E-4547-955A-2080A0473AD6} (Local Area Connection* 8)
1 \Device\NPF_{1D960E08-2A3A-43F7-BAD6-21FCB466717B} (Local Area Connection* 7)
2 \Device\NPF_{98053A85-B049-45A0-AC33-961E2C136FCA} (Local Area Connection* 6)
3 \Device\NPF_{BFA868ED-E508-4436-B085-EC815C4C544C} (LoopBack)
4 \Device\NPF_{C75EAF23-0FA3-433B-B271-9CB0F5EB92D0} (VMware Network Adapter VMnet8)
5 \Device\NPF_{B615DE21-AEC3-4347-916C-332AC4A4DA70} (VMware Network Adapter VMnet1)
6 \Device\NPF_{82E5A370-6D3D-40AD-A9D5-C4E0E0C50F0D} (Ethernet)
And then create a simple bridge.conf file with the VMnet8 adapter and the UDP pariing to talk to Qemu:
Then launch the bridge program listening on port 5001:
D:\qemu>hecnet.exe 5001
Config filename: bridge.conf
Adding router ''update''. 0100007f:5000
Opening pcap \Device\NPF_{C75EAF23-0FA3-433B-B271-9CB0F5EB92D0}
Adding router ''vmnet8''. 00000000:0
Host table:
0: update 127.0.0.1:5000 (Rx: 0 Tx: 0 (Drop rx: 0)) Active: 1 Throttle: 0(000)
1: vmnet8 0.0.0.0:0 (Rx: 0 Tx: 0 (Drop rx: 0)) Active: 1 Throttle: 0(000)
Hash of known destinations:
Adding new hash entry [52:54:00:12:34:56]. Port is 0
Adding new hash entry [00:50:56:c0:00:08]. Port is 1
Adding new hash entry [00:50:56:f1:dd:d0]. Port is 1
Adding new hash entry [00:0c:29:9a:2b:fb]. Port is 1
It’s a little bit more involved to setup as we have to link the 2 programs via UDP, but I can say it’s totally worth it.
“It just works!” – Sydney
I can now easily FTP files into Qemu, and of course telnet as much as I want to. I don’t see why NFS wouldn’t work either.
Which brings us to the bigger elephant in the room, which one is ‘worth the squeeze’?!
I thought it’d be fun to do a totally unfair CPU intensive thing like building GCC. I would do a quick stage 3 compile blindly running this:
./configure --host=i386-sysv4 --target=i386-sysv4 --prefix=/usr/local/gcc-2.5.8
make
make stage1
make CC="stage1/xgcc -Bstage1/" CFLAGS="-g -O"
make stage2
make CC="stage2/xgcc -Bstage2/" CFLAGS="-g -O"
make stage3
make CC="stage3/xgcc -Bstage3/" CFLAGS="-g -O"
This way we can just look at the timestamps between completed releases. It does build C++ & ObjectiveC as well, and compared to machines from 1999 this is amazing!
-rwxr-xr-x 1 neozeed other 3495688 Mar 29 12:42 ./cc1 -rwxr-xr-x 1 neozeed other 2646888 Mar 29 12:37 ./stage1/cc1 -rwxr-xr-x 1 neozeed other 3495720 Mar 29 12:39 ./stage2/cc1 -rwxr-xr-x 1 neozeed other 3495688 Mar 29 12:40 ./stage3/cc1
Qemu timing
-rwxr-xr-x 1 neozeed other 3884076 Mar 28 20:12 ./cc1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 neozeed other 2647116 Mar 28 20:11 ./stage1/cc1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 neozeed other 3884124 Mar 28 20:11 ./stage2/cc1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 neozeed other 3884076 Mar 28 20:12 ./stage3/cc1
VMware timing
As you can see VMware is substantially faster when it comes to computation. This shouldn’t come to anyone as any surprise. And this isn’t a fair competition, but it does show that you can stage GCC on Qemu just fine, so that’s actually great!
Now let’s mix in some more nonsense, I have a Merge license so let’s try it! First off it really wants Windows 95 from CD-ROM. It will not accept anything else. I have a hacked-up copy of the floppy version of Windows 95 on CD-ROM, and it accepted that just fine, it appears to search through.CAB files looking for files to setup it’s preferred environment. I’m not all that familiar with the whole thing as PC’s are cheap, and virtual machines are even cheaper!
Merge setup on VMware
After the setup completed, I thought I’d try my Sarien 286/386 ports.
no DPMI for Merge
Sadly, neither worked. Maybe it’d have better luck with Windows 95 actually installed. I wanted some high colours so I went over to Qemu and found out that it cannot run Merge.
No Merge!
The error lies in a missing opcode 000000FF. Maybe it’s invalid to trigger an exception to call between DOS and the supervisor?
unknown opcode 000000FF
Either way it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t work. I did get feedback that it does run under KVM.
I don’t know why I didn’t think about doing the HecnetNT bridge earlier as it gives things far more flexibility for tapping into networks, or even being transported. I guess I should look at other transport mechanisms besides UDP since it’s 1:1. Also, it might be worth dropping the protocol restrictive filters to allow everything on the wire to flow.
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.
Something weird happened when I was stress testing a build platform, I scripted out a build of all the old Qemu I could with GCC 3.4.5, and I had pointed them to a random disk. Turns out it was a Citrix Multiuser 2 disk. And something weird happened, a few of them actually booted!
I setup a simple script to have it listen on both serial ports, one for the ICA Citrix client, the other accepting a more generic serial terminal.
Sadly it’s only text mode, and at 9600 baud, which you can really feel. Sadly OS/2 PC Serial port drivers sucked.
this kind of setup for me was a bit easier to mess around with linkers as I have multiple screens to view stuff, along with a terrible modem option to transfer files. Only the console can run graphical programs, so this isn’t the one to build a Windows 3.0 farm on
The serial ports lock & jam a lot so I made some scripts to try to deal with it, just rserial1/2 to reset the port, and logouts1/2 to logout the serial connection. Yes it’s that fragile. Being a pre-release version of OS/2 I had zero luck getting any lan client going. If I had it’d make dealing with this thing, even with NetBEUI a lot more tollerable.
I did load up Windows 3.0 by the directions so it does work, albeit standard mode only. Looking back at OS/2 6.123, while it has the OS/2 1.2 interface, it’s MS-DOS was restricted to real mode only. So this was also a nice step up.
One thing to point out is that it’ll hang at the logo screen for literally a minute. I’m not anywhere near as smart enough to debug the loop and ‘fix’ it. Sometimes it just won’t make it, so close it down, and try again. It may seem hopeless sometimes but it does work. Although this unpredictability is why there is no public Citrix 2.0 on demand. I haven’t bothered tryng to build Qemu 0.8.2 on Linux, but if it were more reliable booting and networking, combining it with xinetd having a LAN backing store of homes & apps would make for a neat Citrix on Deman farm thing.
First thing to take care of, is if you have the old pcap on Windows running around. If you have it, you’ll know as you’ll get spammed with “FATAL Bad Memory Block.”, although things will continue to operate just fine.
Win10Pcap!
C:\dynamips\netware\qemu-0.90-pcap-client>qemu -m 16 -L pc-bios -M isapc -hda client.disk -soundhw sb16,adlib -net nic,macaddr=52:24:00:22:00:01 -net pcap,devicename={BFA868ED-E508-4436-B085-EC815C4C544C}
Eth: opened {BFA868ED-E508-4436-B085-EC815C4C544C}
Could not open '\\.\kqemu' - QEMU acceleration layer not activated
FATAL Bad Memory Block.
FATAL Bad Memory Block.
FATAL Bad Memory Block.
FATAL Bad Memory Block.
So be sure to dump that for the one over on npcap!
The old times, actually running Netware 3.12
There was a time when Windows NT didn’t dominate the 1990’s data centre. Instead as a carryover from the 1980’s the majority of corporate LANS were instead based on Netware. And the only way Windows NT was going to make space in this environment was to dress up in sheep’s clothes and mingle among them unnoticed. That brings us to this GEM:
Services for NetWare
This fun CD will let our NT 4.0 server emulate a NetWare server! The first thing in one of these stealth migrations was to just join the existing network.
The existing network is 0C0FFCAB
In order to do this, the two bits of information we need is the frame type, since NetWare supports so many, and the network address. In this case its 0C0FFCAB.
default IPX is no good
By default the NT server will just listen to the network, and participate on what it sees. This is fine if you are just playing along as a dynamic node, but being a NetWare node requires you to step it up, and have these values set, as it is very possible that you could be the first one (or only one) live on the network, and you don’t want clients trying to think on their own.
I also gave mine an internal network number of 1381, because you know, it’s NT 4.0.
To add the FPNW, you need to add it as a new service. Just tell it you have a disk
You’ll then have to point it to the path of the install. This is honestly the hardest part.
Selecting the first option will install the NetWare Server emulation on the NT server.
I went ahead and named my NetWare emulation as SHEEP, as I NT to blend into the existing NetWare network, with nobody being the wiser.
indeed, on our client that was already connected to the Qemu server before I built WOLF, I ran an slist command to show all the servers on the network, and there is my Wolf in Sheep’s clothes.
Creating NetWare compatible volumes is done in the Server Manager, under the FPNW option. It’s pretty self explanatory, nothing too exciting there.
The truth is during the period where this was important the NT 3.51-40 timeframe, NetWare was still a dominant force. But once Windows 95 had launched, and the explosion of people wanting MORE, the natural interest of people going to NT was just amazing to see in corporate space. While there was an early beta of the newshell for NT 3.51, when NT 4.0 shipped it was just amazing as all the reservations for running NT had just evaporated. We’d gone from hiding among the sheep to full on eating them all. It was staggering how fast we were backing up NetWare volumes to only re-format the servers to NT, and get people converted to using them. Before NT 4, the consensus was that rolling out the client config was going to be a nightmare, and that being able to emulate NetWare was the way to go, as it would just work (see the MS-DOS VM talking to NT with an unmodified NetWare client). Instead we saw a massive drive to Windows 95, which ended up changing the client landscape and upending NetWare completly.
About the most difficult thing was user mappings, there was tools to do this kind of thing, and I believe we had something to even proxy passwords, but it was easier to make people just login to the NT side.
Of course this is ONE of the emulators, you might be asking, okay, what is the other?
Why, it’s WINDOWS 95.
YES.
I’m joining the NT domain for the full experence, but the NetWare emulation relies on NetWare servers for authentication. You could use an actual NetWare server, or of course a FPNW server.
Adding file and printer sharing for NetWare workgroups under Windows 95 is done by adding a Service to the network stack. It’s even on the floppy version.
To maximize the functionality and the pain, be sure to turn on SAP Advertising. This way it’ll appear in server lists.
SAP on!
So with all of this in place, yes you can map drives from the MS-DOS client to the Windows 95 workstation acting as a server.
Mapping a drive on 95, authenticated by the WOLF hiding as a SHEEP
And there we go, I can now see the Windows 95 workstation on the SLIST, and connect and map drives. My user account of course exists on the NT side.
While professionally I didn’t rely too much on this feature, but it was nice in that era where you still had MS-DOS/MacOS/OS2 desktops with NetWare clients to quickly share stuff. But in a large organisation this would lead to major issues.
The fundamental flaw in NetWare is that there is no directory service. Instead, all the servers have to broadcast that they exist, along with what services they provide.
On my tiny demo network this isn’t that much traffic. But on a larger network that spans continents this becomes a problem. With thousands of servers there can be an incredible amount of this SAP announcement traffic. Since there is no directory service, the other problem is that when a new client is booted up, it’ll do what is known as a GNS or Get Nearest Server request in order to find the closest server to attach to, in order to facilitate a login. And EVERY server will reply.
And as you can see some servers even will reply more than once. And this can have other effects where people reboot servers during the day, something that is very natural for a Windows 95 user, which could create issues for other users, even forcing them to reboot! And yes, anecdotally I ran into this so many times where people with laptops with this feature turned on, and they would screw up the local office building (impacting hundreds of people). Even when they weren’t winning the GNS elections.they are still generating extra traffic, and occasionally they will win. This was another problem we had with all these wolves hiding in sheep’s clothing.
In the end, NetWare was utterly removed from the data center’s by the end of 1997. Windows NT just scaled too well for SMP and large disks (I had one server with 1TB! It was using 4GB disks it was massive!), along with being able to easily install stuff like SQL Server & SNA Server, unlike NetWare where any NLM conflict will bring the entire thing down. Not having a name lookup server was a giant pain, but the final nail was also in 1997 with the rise of the internet, and normal people now getting involved the entire LAN/WAN was going TCP/IP, where it had only been a fringe protocol used for managing cisco routers, and tftp/ftp some files around, Windows NT’s ability to encapsulate named pipes, and NETBIOS over TCP/IP let them embrace this new world where the TCP/IP stack on NetWare 3.12/4.11 was only good for sending SNMP alerts.
But don’t cry for NetWare, they made so much money they were able to coast for decades before being bought out in 2010 by a Mainframe Terminal Emulation company of all things, The Attachmate Group, who was later in turn bought out by Micro Focus, a COBOL language company. I guess in the end, the Mainframes won?
