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.
You’ll need to have the ethernet driver handy, or better loaded. Since I had disabled the NIC on install it’s not loaded. And since I’m still using a cellphone for internet I extracted the file somewhere else and copied in some patches. I’ve managed to reproduce this twice now, so I guess it’s good to go. Apparently, this just works in later versions, but this is very touchy.
Change the directory to /pcnet , and let it run It will give errors but thats okay. All being well it won’t crash AIX, otherwise you’ll want to restore your hardisk. You did make a backup beforehand right?!
I don’t think it matters but I run this afterwards:
odmchange -o CuAt -q "name=ent0 and attribute=busio" /cdrom/lance_ch.asc odmget -q "name=ent0 and attribute=busio" CuAt shutdown -h now
halting does take forever
As tempting as it is to kill the emulator, wait for it to complete. Otherwise you may have to do the whole thing agian.
For me the value attribute was never preserved, so we get to do it again on reboot/restart:
odmget -q "name=ent0 and attribute=busio" CuAt mount /cdrom odmchange -o CuAt -q "name=ent0 and attribute=busio" /cdrom/lance_ch.asc rmdev -l ent0 mkdev -l ent0 ifconfig en0 10.0.2.15 ping -c 1 10.0.2.2
If everything went well this time you should get a ping reply! Great! Now to configure the system for real.
smitty -> communication -> tcpip -> minimum -> en0
simple slirp
As always I configure my system for slirp. We’re almost there! Now to pad the DNS records for slirp:
If everything goes well, you will have a patched up pcnet driver that works (well mine does)
It works!
The big test is to of course reboot. Then you’ll know for sure.
I have tried this a few times, and yeah it can crash when adding the drivers, so I had to restore a few times. I would say 1/3 times worked flawlessly. So be patient. And backup!
I found a simple c server and client program that was ported to decnet. Â And it was easy enough to follow I thought I’d try something fun. Â So I took Synchronet 3.00c and started to identify the winsock tcpip portions and then slowly alter them to either stubs or being more decnet friendly.
Surprisingly this wasn’t so hard.
The hard part is that decnet doesn’t have a telnet like protocol, Â and I don’t have enough patience to try to reverse how ctermd works, so with a lot of searching I found a semi simple telnet client and mostly got it running on decnet. Â Right now I have issues resolving address, Â so it is hardcoded.
I have to admit it was pretty cool to see the first connection, Â even though it aborted when it couldn’t figure out my ip address. Â I made some more changes, and it worked!!
The next step was to fire up gns3 and build a simple 2 area decnet network and see if a NT box from area one could connect to a bbs in area two. Â And with a few false starts I finally got a working multi area network (decnet isn’t like tcpip!!) This document on cisco’s site was invaluable.
Simple GNS DECnet network
As you can see this is pretty simple. Â I wanted two serial connections so I could run DECnet on one serial connection, and TCP/IP on the other. Â This way I could shut down the TCP/IP connection to ensure my conversation was 100% over DECnet.
R1:
decnet routing iv-prime 1.1
decnet node-type area
!
interface FastEthernet0/0
ip address 192.168.0.1 255.255.255.0
duplex auto
speed auto
decnet cost 20
!
interface Serial1/0
no ip address
decnet cost 20
serial restart-delay 0
!
interface Serial1/1
ip address 10.5.0.1 255.255.255.252
serial restart-delay 0
!
router rip
network 10.0.0.0
network 192.168.0.0
 And R2:
decnet routing iv-prime 2.1
decnet node-type area
!
interface FastEthernet0/0
ip address 192.168.2.1 255.255.255.0
duplex auto
speed auto
decnet cost 10
!
interface FastEthernet0/1
ip address dhcp
duplex auto
speed auto
!
interface Serial1/0
no ip address
decnet cost 10
serial restart-delay 0
!
interface Serial1/1
ip address 10.5.0.2 255.255.255.252
serial restart-delay 0
!
router rip
redistribute static
network 10.0.0.0
network 192.168.2.0
 As you can see the configuration is pretty simple.  I went with RIP because it’s a small network, and I only need a few routes.  EIRP, OSPF and friends are just pure overkill.  And recall VMNet8 is the NAT interface provided by VMWare Player.
Checking output from the routers, shows that DECnet is routing, and that I can ping both of my test NT boxes:
R1#show decnet route
Area Cost Hops Next Hop to Node Expires Prio
*1 0 0 (Local) -> 1.1
*2 20 1 Serial1/0 -> 2.1 44 64 A+
Node Cost Hops Next Hop to Node Expires Prio
*(Area) 0 0 (Local) -> 1.1
*1.1 0 0 (Local) -> 1.1
*1.3 20 1 FastEthernet0/0 -> 1.3 65
R1#ping decnet 1.3
Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte DECnet echos to atg 0 area.node 1.3, timeout is 5 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 4/7/12 ms
R1#ping decnet 2.5
Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte DECnet echos to atg 0 area.node 2.5, timeout is 5 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 12/34/60 ms
R1#
 Everything is looking good! I fired up my DECnet telnet and success!!
And I must say, it’s an excellent way to make older machines more ‘accessible’ to everyone. I know it’s only going to encourage ‘kids’ to get into VAX’s etc, and of course as many are aware, Vista and beyond have removed the telnet client.. (and hyperterm for that matter!!!).
We are now living in a world devoid of telnet & rs232.
Flashterm, is one of those fancy GCC for flash projects that uses the flash socket API to create a telnet client! Right now they are focused on ANSI emulation geared towards BBS’s. But if you’ve got a firewall to redirect ports, or if you are running the ‘policy’ server directly you can let people into your machine, and all they need is a modern browser/flash combination which you can safely say all ‘kids’ machines will have (and yes even my parents, as they LOVE those silly flash games, and dancing cats).
Anyways, the control key is NOT captured, so there is no control+d to kill your session, but a ‘reload’ of the browser, or closing the tab will do it just as well. Robots doesn’t work correctly, but all & all it’s a super simple way to get back to your machines!
I’ve set one up in the meantime as a test…
http://vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com/telnet
Although I don’t know how long I’ll keep it online. But it does create the possibility now of having not only information on various ancient UNIX but to allow others to use them!.. And for most internet users, with no real downloads as that flash thing is EVERYWHERE…
