This is where I keep all my notes, and I’d encourage others to come on and fill in the MASSIVE blanks…

http://gunkies.org/wiki/Main_Page

I still think it’s got great potential but that my be just me..

Also The Unix Heritage Society has gone wiki as well…  I wish I were an authority on ancient Unix, but it does have potential it only needs people to start…..

As promised the MicroVAX II/4.3BSD-RENO package has been completed. You can download it from here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=204974&package_id=245145

What’s new in this version?

Well again, usermode networking (SLiRP) from Qemu. A newer OS and emulator to take advantage of it. And pre-built gzip & irc. Yes I know it’s not much but since /usr/local is a seperate disk, I can update it later. I’m hoping to get gcc 1.x running, and *MAYBE* even Apache or Lynx. But I’m not sure at the moment if they’ll build. I’ve been using this build for an irc client and so far no issues.

Here is the install notes:

——-8<-------8<-------8<-------8<-------8<-------8<-------8<-------8<>
Welcome to this Beta test of SIM-H 3.7 on Windows with BSD 4.3-Reno

This is the second time I’ve written a NSIS install package
so bear with me.

*Please note that this program is nowhere Vista compliant. The user data is
dumped into the program file directory (bad) so you must run this program elevated
as Administrator! (right click on the program link “RUN 4.3BSD-RENO”, and choose run as Administrator).

You can login as root, there is no passwords. I have setup the installation so that you can preserve
the disk images, or overwrite them by simply re-installing the program. This way anyone can easily recover
from a massive system failure.

On NT/2000/2003/XP/Vista machines I would *HIGHLY* recommend compressing the drive images using NTFS
Compression, as the install takes nearly 2 gigabytes, but using compression it will occupy about 135 Megabytes.

I have included a bunch of the documents in PDF format. Before you give up saying there isn’t enough
documention, you may find there is actually too much. All documentation was converted under OS X (groff -t -ms *> bla.ps;open bla.ps)

I have included an IRC client that will default to chat.taucher.net (a BSD support site), simply pick a name (bob)
And type the following in as root:

irc bob
/join #bsd

From there you will be on the channel. Feel free to say Hi!

The main website is http://sourceforge.net/projects/bsd42/

By default you should install *everything*. The config
file is setup to mount a /home drive separate from the
Operation System. This will allow for a somewhat painless
recovery if you trash the OS.

On uninstalling you will have the option of keeping your
home disk.

I have installed this copy of 4.3BSD-Reno from the Unix Archive.

The emulator is currently setup for a MicroVAX and it includes SLiRP from
the QEMU project. This allows for ‘user mode networking’ and will allow
you to immediately connect to the internet with no overhead.

The following ports are automatically redirected into the emulator:

HOST PC BSD
42323 23
42380 80
42119 119
42666 666
42667 6667

Of all the ports setup, the only daemon I’ve currently tested is telnet. You
can telnet into 4.3BSD-Reno by typing in:

telnet localhost 42323

Or by using the “attach a pty” link from the start menu.

This is the configuration file that I’m using.
——
set cpu 32m
set cpu idle
att nvr reno.nvram
set rq0 ra81
att rq0 reno.disk
set rq1 ra81
att rq1 usrlocal.disk
set rq2 ra81
att rq2 opt.disk
set rq3 ra81
att rq3 home.disk
set tq tk50
set tq dis
set lpt dis
set ts dis
set rl dis
set cr dis
set ry dis
set dz lines=4
set tti 7b
set tto 7b
att xq bb
load -r ka655.bin
dep bdr 0
boot cpu
exit
——-

By default on windows the console will not handle ascii correctly.
I have enclosed a copy of putty that will connect on the correct port,
the link is the “Attach a PTY”. Just wait for the Operating System
to boot up to the login prompt.

——-8<-------8<-------8<-------8<-------8<-------8<-------8<-------8<
That’s about it!

Feel free to download it, and give me any feed back! Even better join me on IRC!

Recently I’ve taken it upon myself to update the sourceforge pages for SIMH. In the process of building platform EXE’s for people and whatnot, I’ve decided to try to make some of the more popular Operating Systems easier to use for the Windows users.

From what I’ve seen of the downloads the Windows users are the largest group, then followed by OSX. I’ve actually seen 2x more downloads for NeXTSTEP than Linux/i386… But I suspect it’s an advertising thing if anything else.

So inorder to make 4.2BSD more accessable to the end user I have spent a day with NSIS, and created an install package.

You can now download 4.2BSD in an easy to use EXE here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=204974&package_id=245145&release_id=538195

As I write this the current version is listed as v0.1a . I fixed a few annoying bugs, however I wanted to push out a release before I went to sleep.

What I have tried to do here, is seperate the user data, from the Operating System. By doing this a novice can quickly repair the OS, but re-installing the os component from a windows installer. Currently this NSIS script doesn’t support repairs, so to do it cleanly you must uninstall 4.2BSD, doing so will give you the options of preserving your OS & Home disks. If the OS is trashed, simply allow it to remove the OS, but retain the home disk. Then re-install the application, and uncheck the home disk. This will preserve the one in place.

I’ve also included a copy of putty to give a better tty experence to the end user. I’m thinking about changing this so that the console is brought up with putty.

At any rate, if anyone thinks something along these lines is a good tool, let me know!

Hope you had a good holiday, Bob has published a new update to SIMH!

http://simh.trailing-edge.com/

On a related note, I’ve been able to get a few to compile for the iPhone, but they have fread errors… I’m not sure what’s going on so I’m going to try to adapt the disk access to sqllite (it’s part of the base os on the iPhones!) kind of like my .net ‘updates’ to simh.

I really need to put all these things somewhere…

Well at anyrate I think I’ll try to build a NLM for the 1 remaning Netware user out there.. And to check portability.

I decided to update my pcap patches for Qemu 0.9.0 . Now I know that for the majority of people the user mode NAT works fine for them, or they are on a platform where they enjoy playing tun/tap games. However tun/tap aren’t available on every platform. That and some of us run things like Novell Netware.

The patches are as follows:

The patch for plain QEMU
http://qemu-forum.ipi.fi/download.php?id=389

And adding support for NeXTSTEP
http://qemu-forum.ipi.fi/download.php?id=390

Now how robust is this? Well I have transfered about a gigabyte on a VM on the internet with this thing. The machine in question is a windows 2003 server running this Qemu as a service. http://tiger.vaxenrule.com/ . It’s hosting it’s own Apache, and it seems somewhat responsive to me.

I can provide exe’s if anyone is interested just contact me via here…

Yeah, lots of fun for work, with back to back travel. However while I was out, Micorosft Virtual Server R2 sp1 shipped! Details are available here ( http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/ ). I’m pretty sure this supports Vista Ultimate & Business as a host platform. I think it includes more support for Linux, but I’ve just installed it on a bare machine, I haven’t had a chance to fire it up just yet.

It’s overcast but not raining. Sometimes I forget what the weather in England can be like. I should have brought a jacket.

Oh well Wednesday I’ll be in the Americas again….

It’s not really a vacation per say, but I’ve been in Miami the last week for work… And it’s been quite the dog/pony show. At any rate I leave Miami on Tuesday, then Wednesday I’m out to London…

I’ve been playing with this:

http://puszcza.gnu.org.ua/projects/apout/

It’s like psim, except the enviroment is the PDP-11. I took the source and ripped out the core unixystuff (ttio, forking & whatnot) until I got a copy to build under Windows. It’ll play hunt the wumpus from Research Unix v6.

I’ll post more on this later.

Oh and I’m still alive!

I was thinking with some of the larger files on my poor webserver it’d get slamed with too many people on it. Then I noticed that uTorrent supprots a limited tracker server, so I put two and two together, and decided to give it a shot.

I setup a RSS feed of the current torrents here: http://www.vaxenrule.com/vaxenrule.xml . You can subscribe to it, and that way you’ll get the ‘newest’ of the old. Also it’ll allow me to have a few machines at work in various locations througout the world to share the load as it were.

As of this moment, I’m sharing SLS 1.05 & Lites/Mach UK22. I figure something old & something obscure is a good start.