(this is a guest post by Tenox)
Finally someone made a distribution with CDE as default eyecandy. I’m happy.
Enter CDEbian!
Diamond in a pile of shit
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Category Archives: random updates
My 80’s TV!
Speaking of retro!
totally!
It’s the best thing since GTA Vice City!
It’s kind of amazing there is that much uploaded to youtube these days. Â I guess with enough archivists out there, you never have to leave those oh so innocent and simple decades. Â Or at least the ‘music channels’ are the perfect thing to listen to, while reading olduse.net.
Virtualization Challenge Part II – WYSE Unix
(this is a guest post from Tenox)
The second virtualization contest is now on! Similar to the previous one, the winner receives $100 via Paypal and the submission is posted on this blog! Hopefully this one will be little bit more challenging. 🙂
The subject is the rarest of the rare WYSE Unix!
The progress so far: A few years ago I came in to possession of a set of floppy disks pictured here:
Thanks to Al Kossow from bitsavers.org the floppy disk content has been recovered. Michal Necasek of OS/2 museum successfully converted them in to an usable format and made some modifications to get them to boot on VirtualBox:
Couple of years later, thanks to Andrew Gong, a WYSE Unix tape has been found on eBay:
More recently Al Kossow was able to read the tape in to an image, which now I have uploaded to my web server: wyseunix321a.zip
The next step is yours! Install the whole system on to a hypervisor of your choice, document the process and supply a vanilla boot image or VM.
The winner shall be the person who will first post a comment declaring success including a screenshot and can further prove it by emailing emailing me the submission shortly after. If the comment gets blocked by spam filter, don’t worry the original submission time will of course count. Oh and almost forgot: I also need aclock binary for it, however if there is no compiler and the standard SysV binary works fine, you are exempt from the requirement.
The catch? Looks like floppy disk trouble. The boot disk is fine after it has been fixed up by Michal. The Base floppy looks like has same content as boot. Copy Tools is very small. Looks like it may be truncated. Hopefully not, but if yes I count on your creativity. Remember that Dell Unix is an exactly save release of SystemV/386 and did not have or needed copy tools to install.
Good Luck!
Update: Looks like the contest has been won by Mihai! Congratulations!
VenturComm Venix/86 on PCem
(this is a guest post by Tenox)
This is a step by step guide on how to install Venix/86 on PCem, by runner up of Venix/86 Virtualization Challenge – Mihai Gaitos of hawk.ro. Thanks for a great work!
Rebuilding Venix for PCEM:
First, in order to avoid problems with weird HDD parameters I chose a reasonable hdd geometry – 512 cylinders, 8 heads, 17 sectors (most drives back then had 17 sectors).
HDD geometry:
BIOS Autodetect:
(answer “Y” here)
The obvious approach of Booting the XFER.IMG and then switching to BACKUPn.IMG doesn’t work, failing with “Soft error”:
Continue reading
Dealing with Gmail’s attachment ‘security’
Blocked!
Ugh I’m sure I’m not the only one that has this issue. Â So before google drive, and friends were a thing, gmail gave us 1GB of mail space (at the time why it was called ‘G’ mail). Â And what better way to make files available between machines than to email them to yourself?
Well this worked for YEARS then they started to block some extensions, and now they block damned near everything. Â From their ‘Learn more’
Some file types are blocked
As a security measure to prevent potential viruses, Gmail doesn’t allow you to send or receive executable files (such as files ending in .exe). Executable files can contain harmful code that might cause malicious software to download to your computer. In addition, Gmail doesn’t allow you to send or receive corrupted files, files that don’t work properly.
You can’t send or receive the following file types:
.ade, .adp, .bat, .chm, .cmd, .com, .cpl, .exe, .hta, .ins, .isp, .jar, .jse, .lib, .lnk, .mde, .msc, .msp, .mst, .pif, .scr, .sct, .shb, .sys, .vb, .vbe, .vbs, .vxd, .wsc, .wsf, .wsh
Messages containing the types of files listed above will be bounced back and returned to the sender automatically. Gmail won’t accept these file types even if they’re sent in a zipped format. Here are some examples of zipped formats:
.zip, .tar, .tgz, .taz, .z, .gz, .rar
Well isn’t that great. Â Of course when I’m uploading source I tend to include executables, custom batch scripts to either clean or prepare, and sometimes run whatever it is I’m doing. Perhaps libraries, jar’s and maybe even device drivers.
Thinking the email attachment had been lost I was looking to see if I can forward it, when I stumbled onto this interesting bit:
The show original option!
This lets you view the email in it’s un- formatted state, which also includes the attachments!
So from here it’s a simple matter of saving the file to your hard disk. Â It is important that you ONLY save the base64 portion not that headers. Â I guess this is a pain for multiple attachments as b64 doesn’t read MIME containers.
If you look at an email it’ll roughly look like this:
MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.64.9.141 with HTTP; Tue, 29 Oct 2012 13:33:16 -0700 (PDT) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2012 13:33:26 +0800 Delivered-To: [email protected] Message-ID: <CA+rfG9Z-5Ej7iuXs36a_Lryqw+gs52GMUEFE9XPrSswjHRxXqw@mail.gmail.com> Subject: doom? From: Neozeed <[email protected]> To: The Number One Guy <[email protected]> Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=001a11c3b874d1eaf704e9dde937 --001a11c3b874d1eaf704e9dde937 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=001a11c3b874d1eaf204e9dde935 --001a11c3b874d1eaf204e9dde935 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Don't lose this file! --001a11c3b874d1eaf204e9dde935 Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <div dir=3D"ltr">Don't lose this file! =A0<div><br></div> --001a11c3b874d1eaf204e9dde935-- --001a11c3b874d1eaf704e9dde937 Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name="DOOM_SRC_102813.7Z" Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="DOOM_SRC_102813.7Z" Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 X-Attachment-Id: f_hncxub2b0 N3q8ryccAAPH+QLokKMEAAAAAAAkAAAAAAAAAKm3ezkABoLDcK0hSHl0xaeKFIsLY1Idc7MMQAtM jDXWS9Sc5PvtvOmy27+byH8YZTOBY65JnEi5L9U41YDw53Wi1/xxpcR8Az8yIfc7DjQIT0ULtATL
We start the file at the ”
N3q8ryccAAPH+QLokKMEAAAAAAAkAAAAAAAAAKm3ezkABoLDcK0hSHl0xaeKFIsLY1Idc7MMQAtM
line. Â I’m going to save it in notepad as “attachment.b64”
Now for the decoding!
I’m using b64, from sourceforge. Â However you need an ‘older’ version 1.4 as the newer version has a decode bug. Â Also
b64 -l76 -d attachment.b64Â output.7z
And this will (blindly) decode the attachment.b64 into output.7z. Â And from here you can extract the file without any issues.
As a bonus, if you have Outlook, you can just save the entire file as an .eml and open it in Outlook!
So easy!
Also for Outlook 2003/2007 users you may have to use this registry alteration to have them support directly loading of .eml files.
Veritas in a Modern World
(this is a guest post by Tenox)
I used to use Veritas products (Volume Manager, File System and Cluster) professionally for quite a long time on Solaris and HP-UX. Except for Cluster, the software was exceptional for it’s time. Unfortunately after acquisition by Symantec and advancements of other storage technologies such as ZFS, the product suite disappeared from the radar completely.
Back to present time, I have a small x64 server that I use primarily as a NAS box plus run some applications, services and a few VMs. The machine runs Windows 2012 R2 Server which, for most parts I really like, with an exception of the storage stack, namely Storage Spaces. This is a completely botched feature both from functionality and management point of view. I don’t want to rant about it too much about it, so I just leave it as non working.
Unable work with Microsoft Bob of storage I have been looking for different alternatives, from using the Windows built-in VDS RAID-5 option, to moving entirely to a different OS. This is when I remembered that, some (OMFG!) 10 years ago Symantec has announced free Storage Foundation Basic, also available on Windows. Still continued and supported to this day, so obviously I wanted to give it a spin and evaluate whether it makes any sense to use such a dinosaur in a modern world.
I spun up a Windows 2012 R2 guest vm, added some data disks, downloaded the latest version 6.1 (released in 2014) from here and ran the installer.
One of those days..
Uh, that’s not me!
Ever have one of those days, where you suddenly get a weird email? Â Recently I thought the whole ‘google security’ thing was a bit over the top, then I get this fine email. Â I’m pretty sure it’s from a hotel I stayed at, looks like they had something there to MitM me. Great. Â But thankfully they used an old ass machine from the looks of it, so it triggered google.
You may want to check your security settings here, if you are using Google, with their security settings centre.
https://security.google.com/settings/security/secureaccoun
If you know your phone will work where you travel, and don’t mind the typical phone company overcharge for daring to leave the area, I’d enable 2 factor authentication as well.
Venix/86 Challenge
(this is a guest post by Tenox)
I’m extremely busy with some matters and unable to spend much time with computer archaeology. I would like for some much overdue projects to progress independently of myself, so hopefully the community can participate and help out.
Let’s start with Venix/86 which has been awaiting my attention for a while. I have been recently contacted by Alex aka uav1606 who wanted to get it to work. I have since decided to open this up to anyone else interested.
To my knowledge actual install media did not surface so far. However a while ago I came in to possession of a boot disk and a backup of a live system, in form of nine floppy disks which look like a tar archive. In theory it should be possible to boot the xfer disk, format a hard disk and restore the backup system to get a working system.
VenturCom Venix/x86 running on a real AT/286
I’m offering $100 prize via PayPal to the first person who will run Venix/86 on an emulator of any kind (PCE, PicoXT, QEMU, Bochs, Vbox, MESS/MAME, etc NOTE: it doesn’t have to be strictly XT emulator as long as the system works), compiles Aclock and sends me a binary + complete working virtual machine. I will also of course publish it on this blog featuring all your hard work! It will be awesome to see your progress and collaboration in the comments 😉
Everything I have is here: http://www.tenox.net/get/venix21.zip
Update #1: From Frode van der Meeren who is the owner of the floppy disks: “The disk images are not corrupted, the disks only use a different track arrangement. The disks image format arranges the tracks by cylinders, storing head 0 and then head 1, while the actual disks arrange tracks by all cylinders on head 0 then all cylinders on head 1. If you want to mount the images into something else than Venix/86 then you need to rearrange the tracks in the image file.”
Update #2: the competition has been won by Jim Carpenter! Congratulations! Jim has just received the $100 prize. I have received detailed install instructions and will post it in a follow up post 🙂
Update #3: The winning entry, how to install Venix/86 on MESS/MAME
Venix/x86 running on MESS/MAME by Jim Carpenter
It was a real pleasure to see great community response, participation and most importantly to see Venix/x86 run again!
Stay tuned for another one 😉
Mapping into onedrive
So since I got one of those ultra cheap windows tablets with Office 365 for free, I found this post with a nifty tip on how to map the one drive.
Or simply:
net use O: Â https://d.docs.live.net/YOURSID/
And if you open up onedrive in a browser you’ll see in the URL:
https://onedrive.live.com/?id=YOURID&cid=YOURSID
very simple stuff.
I accidentally upgraded vpsland to Debian 8
So yeah, dealing with Apache 2.4 vs 2.2 was… fun. Â The security Order stuff is obsolete so that was fun editing all the virtual hosts.
The key parts being:
In this example, all requests are denied.
2.2 configuration:
Order deny,allow Deny from all
2.4 configuration:
Require all denied
In this example, all requests are allowed.
2.2 configuration:
Order allow,deny Allow from all
2.4 configuration:
Require all granted
In the following example, all hosts in the example.org domain are allowed access; all other hosts are denied access.
Boy was that fun!
Another bit of fallout was the hosts file. Â I have spamd running and suddenly I was being bombarded with this message:
Jul 25 10:15:39 cheapvps spamc[683]: connect to spamd on ::1 failed, retrying (#1 of 3): Connection refused
Well it turns out after much digging around that Debian 8 is more IPv6 ready. Â The hosts file from Debian 7 was something like this:
127.0.0.1 localhost
::1 localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
And in 8, it changed to this:
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
# Auto-generated hostname. Please do not remove this comment.
::1 localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
Needless to say, having localhost point to ::1 made it dependant on all local daemons supporting IPv6, and spamd sadly is IPv4 only. Â Luckily it’s a quick fix to remove localhost from ::1, which then let’s it work again with 127.0.0.1, and now it can connect over IPv4.
Well today (August 4th, 2015) there was a critical update to Apache. Â And after updating I got this fine error:
# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
[….] Restarting apache2 (via systemctl): apache2.serviceJob for apache2.service failed. See ‘systemctl status apache2.service’ and ‘journalctl -xn’ for details.
failed!
Great. Â So what does the error actually say?
# systemctl status apache2.service
* apache2.service – LSB: Apache2 web server
Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/apache2)
Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Tue 2015-08-04 13:52:13 HKT; 7s ago
Process: 6063 ExecStop=/etc/init.d/apache2 stop (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Process: 6427 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/apache2 start (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
systemd[1]: Starting LSB: Apache2 web server…
apache2[6427]: Starting web server: apache2 failed!
apache2[6427]: The apache2 configtest failed. …….
apache2[6427]: Output of config test was:
apache2[6427]: apache2: Syntax error on line 250 …y
apache2[6427]: Action ‘configtest’ failed.
apache2[6427]: The Apache error log may have more….
systemd[1]: apache2.service: control process exi…=1
systemd[1]: Failed to start LSB: Apache2 web server.
systemd[1]: Unit apache2.service entered failed …e.
Hint: Some lines were ellipsized, use -l to show in full.
Fantastic.
# apachectl configtest
apache2: Syntax error on line 250 of /etc/apache2/apache2.conf: Could not open configuration file /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/alias.load: No such file or directory
Action ‘configtest’ failed.
The Apache error log may have more information.
So, normally you’d check under modules-enabled, and link in the missing bits, right? Yeah except there is no MPM modules. Not anymore. Â And yes I removed and re-installed the apache2-mpm-prefork module, to no avail. Â So after much digging around it looks like the transition to 2.4 finally broke everything irrecoverably. Â So I backed up the /etc/apache2 directory than ran the follwing:
apt-get purge apache2
Which then removes all the apache2 stuff from the system. Â Then to finish it off, run a quick
rm -rf /etc/apache2
You did back it up, right?
now put it back in..
apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-php5
Now to re-enable the virtual sites.  For some reason they need to be enabled with a2ensite.  Except they don’t tell you that your sites now need to end in .conf in the /etc/apache2/sites-available (you did back it up right?)
Also if you run perl (src2html) be sure to run:
a2enmod cgi
service apache2 restart
Not to mention the joys of updating perl, and the cvsweb breaking, and I’m sure far more to break. Â Oh well, at least it’ll be up to date. Â That’s what I get for mixing ‘stable’ with ‘old stable’, when the local mirror out in the UK I was using moved up to 8.