Sometimes taking a binary and sending it through a text only medium (email) is a damned handy thing. Â And sometimes you are dealing with old crap and being able to decode what you’ve just built would help a TONNE.
Luckily uudecode already exists. Â So before I forget it, the link to a nice BSD version that’ll compile on any good UNIX and MS-DOS system is available here.
So my BBS thing is down… hard. Â After asking the provider ….
It appears that one of the air conditioning facility at the data centre has ceased operation and so servers are struggling with the heat. Emergency work is already being carried out.
Such is life in the ‘cloud’.
It’s times like this it’d be nice if doubletake were cheap enough for us low end users.
I suppose there is rsync, but that’d take a little work with Qemu, or would it?
“We’re moving most of our servers from SVTIX[1] to Market Post Tower[2] this
weekend. we’ve got layer 2 between the two locations already, so we’ll
be bringing down servers in batches of five and moving them five at a shot.
each user should experience something like two hours of downtime, if all
goes well.”
Well at least luke is transparent on the whole thing so it looks like there will be more bumps ahead. But I do have a full backup so worst case I can bring this online elsewhere if this goes down.
If anything the blogger outage made me finally break down and get that squared away.
and other old kit… I came up with nothing..
Does anyone know any stores, that sell ancient stuff, like megadrives, acorns, BBC micros etc?
There must be somewhere in the British Isles….
Also I’m wondering if I should check prices for Russia in the Summer, or Japan in the Winter……
I think I need a vacation from this vacation.
Well I’ve been playing with some old MS-DOS software, and putting stuff together for it, I’ve had some MAJOR issues with SDL, between mapping my keyboard incorrectly, to the video not refreshing correctly when it’s not in focus or if another window overlapped it.
It’s a shame as DOSBox is usually pretty cool, but on my x64 system it’d been flaking out with the most annoying being the \,/,{,} & arrow keys not working right. Well for the heck of it, I downloaded & built my own SDL.dll for Qemu, and overwrote the one that comes with DOSBox… And it works PERFECTLY…..
This has been a WAY better fix, then messing around with my HID, removing drivers on EVERY reboot.
Just as there is HECNet for DECNET, there isn’t anything comperable for NetBIOS… would anyone even be interested in such a thing?
I would be trivial to modify the hecnet bridge program to transport netbios… And I’ve done SIMH, I suppose other emulators (qemu) could be modified to talk to a hecnet style bridge with netbios….
Anyone interested?
I was googleing about, and came across this. As far as I know at the moment, this is the only place you can find information about running Ultrix on SIMH’s MicroVAX II.
I don’t know if anyone cares about such an odd ball one, but I thought I’d throw it out…
I hope they get them back up soon.. In the meantime I finished my Windows 95 notes (well for now) and I have put them on gunkies.
I’ve also done some preliminary notes on Windows NT 4.0.
Anyways it’s been … boring.. so I thought I’d kick this much into the system… I may also start hocking some pre-installed OEM Qemu stuff… lol.
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!