(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 😉

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:  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.

So apparently sometimes doing ‘stupid things(tm)’ can overheat your disks, and your box… So you should always keep an eye on the temperature.

So for my benefit more so in the future, and maybe others, here is a quick script to check the temperature of the processors, disk, and any changes in /var/log/messages to see what is going on.  I guess I should make it more modular, and not hardcode stuff, but here we are.

#!/bin/bash
#
#
# Read the disk temperature

disk="smartctl -d ata -A /dev/sda  | grep Temperature_Celsius | awk '{print \$10}'"
diskt=$(eval $disk)

if [ "$diskt"  -gt 40 ];
	then
	error=$"Disk temperature is hotter than 40c it's now $diskt\n"
	else
#	error=$"Disk temperature is fine, it's $diskt\n"
	:
	fi

sensors| grep Core|awk '{print $3}'>/tmp/dat.txt

j=0

while read line
do
number="echo $line |sed 's/\.\0\°C//g'|sed 's/\+//g'"
cpu=$(eval $number)
if [ "$cpu" -gt 82 ];
	then
	error=$"$error\nCPU core $j temperature is $cpu"
	else
	#error=$"$error\nCPU core $j temperature is $cpu"
	:
	fi
j=$(($j+1))
done < /tmp/dat.txt rm -f /tmp/dat.txt if [[ -f /tmp/messages.1 ]]; 	then 	tail /var/log/messages > /tmp/messages.2
	dstring="diff /tmp/messages.1 /tmp/messages.2" 
	logadd=$(eval $dstring)
	if [ ! -z "$logadd" ];
		then
		error=$"$error\n\n$logadd"
		else
		:
		fi
	mv /tmp/messages.2 /tmp/messages.1
	else
	tail /var/log/messages > /tmp/messages.1
	fi

if [ ! -z "$error" ];
	then
	echo "there are issues.."
	echo -e $error > /tmp/message.tmp
	mail your_name@your_domain.com -s "errors on machine_name" 

Of course, it can and should be expanded to check up on things like SMART disk errors, and other things going on.  And of course in the crontab, something like:

*/5  *    *   *   *   /root/report.sh

To run it every five minutes.  As always it’s lacking comments, full pathing to executables, and much of anything to keep it safe.  I’m sure if I was smart I could read more from pipes and variables, but I’m old so I read from files.  If you were looking for the bash shell script expert, it’s not me. lol

So Cloudflare is hitting my site like crazy, basically DOS’ing me.  So Im going back to the old way.  And then as luck has it my DNS guy has a fit once, I move the root enteries off Cloudflare.

websitespot…

Yeah, so looks like I’m going off line, but once I get the DNS sorted out I’ll be back.

OK I’m back.  Turns out it’s someone in Hungary that has their client misconfigured.

80.64.65.25 – – [11/May/2015:11:21:17 -0400] “GET /?feed=rss HTTP/1.1” 301 496 “-” “Mozilla/6.0 (compatible; Firefox 9.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)”
80.64.65.25 – – [11/May/2015:11:21:18 -0400] “GET /feed/ HTTP/1.1” 200 37325 “-” “Mozilla/6.0 (compatible; Firefox 9.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)”
80.64.65.25 – – [11/May/2015:11:21:20 -0400] “GET /?feed=rss HTTP/1.1” 301 496 “-” “Mozilla/6.0 (compatible; Firefox 9.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)”
80.64.65.25 – – [11/May/2015:11:21:21 -0400] “GET /feed/ HTTP/1.1” 200 37325 “-” “Mozilla/6.0 (compatible; Firefox 9.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)”

I’ve had to block you, 80.64.65.25, whomever you are.

May the 4th

Since when was this a thing?

Anyways, for those of you who want to get your MS-DOS fill, a bunch of the old Lucas Arts games are on sale today on GOG.

some things are still broken, and yeah… it’s been fun.

So, the disk in my colo el-cheapo box died. No problem, I have a backup right? After the last great disaster.  Well that disk DIED TOO.

Un-real.

So here we are running on some half baked incremental backup.  At least I did have this much here we are.

it’s late, I have updates, but I’m tired.