So, I used to think Lan Manager Domains and early NT Domains were the same thing

Obviously, this was wrong.

And besides the NetBEUI being eaten on the network for no reason I can see, as I’m sure these machines should be able to talk to each-other this was the end result:

The OS/2 domain is not a Windows NT domain

And what about not trying to create a machine account?

The domain controller for this domain cannot be located.

I should have expected this not to work.

Having dumped NetBEUI for TCP/IP, I can see them talk, it’s not a name resolution issue or anything like that. On the flip side can LAN Manager join a Windows NT domain? I’m not sure on that one either.

And not too surprising using the LAN Manager DOS client I can log onto the OS/2 domain just fine.

Kind of verbose and annoying but yes, it works!

However, despite LAN Manager 2.2 providing a TCP/IP stack to connect to both OS/2 and NT servers, there is no winsock interoperability dll. Do I really have to load more than one NIC and stack at the same time?!

The one thing I had been hoping to build up to was using mailslots, a UDP like IPC/RPC mechanism from back in the old dark days of early LAN Manager 1.0 The can be broadcasted to all nodes on the network that are listening by writing to \\*\MAILSLOT\<YOUR LOCAL BOX>. On the surface these broadcast type things are modern day terrible, we prefer lookup services like DNS, but in the 80’s it’s not like people were going to put tens of thousands of machines on a single network…

The Mandelbrot example

I cannot thank my Patrons enough for this attempt at doing something multitenant as I really did need Microsoft C 6, and the Windows 3.0 SDK. The example from the Lan Manager 2.0 Programmer’s Toolkit (Why was this stuff never in the base SDK?!) shows an OS/2 LAN Manager service providing rendering services over the network to render the Mandelbrot to the Win16 client. It’s actually very neat. It really gives OS/2 that pre-Windows NT feel, with the services as they are not in your face, although at the same time I’ve found that I had to do an interactive logon to get things started, so maybe LAN Manager OS/2 servers were not “Lights out”? I guess I need to look more into it, as it just feels more and more how NTOS2/ clearly grew out of OS/2 + LAN Manager.

Obviously as soon as I see this, thanks to getting my hands on the OS/2 6.78 network client, I also see it’s not only obsolete but going to be removed. If anything, it’s impressive that an OS/2 feature has remained in NT for so long.

The LAN Manager 1.0 disk sets, actually include headers & libraries, but no examples.

I had wanted to do something with TCPIP and mailslots, and I had figured that Windows NT would be the best glue being in that perfect space of OS/2 compatibility and robust TCP/IP, but I wasted far too much time to basically see that if they are not part of the same domain, the mailslot’s just don’t work.

I haven’t given up, but I primarily used Netware for PC networking back in the 90’s so this is all kind of new to me. Looking through resource kits online there doesn’t seem to be a lot of material about integrating LAN Manager into a NT Domain.

I’ll have to re-think this.

The world vs NetBEUI

NetBEUI

I don’t know what is going on, other than it feels like something is filtering me on either Windows 10 or 11. I have a Windows 2000 server with NetBEUI running under Hyper-V, and trying to map to it from OS/2 using the Lan Manager 2.2 disks floating around (you have to merge them as some stuff is missing like #2 driver disks), lets you map directly but finding each-other seems to be difficult. Even trying to rebuild on the same machine using either a MS Loopback interface, or a VMware interface also has endless weirdness, or in the capture above they can be seen on Wireshark speaking but not hearing each-other. I thought it was LAN drivers, or the old friends, IO/IRQ/DMA channel issues, but after trying various configs, I tried TCP/IP and..

TCP/IP

They find each-other right away. Instantly, it just works. Have we hit the point where there is silent filters screwing up non TCP/IP protocols using pcap injection on Windows? Am I going insane?

WLO for OS/2

Speaking of OS/2 weirdness, I was doing some SQL installs, and I came across disk images for 4.1A, and in there is the graphical tools for Windows & OS/2! Although I didn’t think Microsoft ever did port the graphical tools to OS/2, and I’d be right. However on setup disk 2 is WLO/Porthole! Turns out this was used in a shipping product! Unlike the one for Excel 3.0, or the applettes, this installs into the C:\OS2\DLL directory! So, this is the real deal!

Admin 2000 from OS/2

I could logon to my Windows 2000 server from OS/2, but the opposite would never work. On the capture I just see it endlessly trying to find by name, but OS/2 is silent.

I must be missing something obvious somewhere.

I’m hoping to be building this towards something, so I’ll update later.

Setting up SNA networking with Hercules using DLSw

I finally broke down and made a quick video on setting up the DLSw ‘lab’ that I had uploaded on Internet Archive.

See it works!

Although I should have gone more in depth with the cisco part.

Namely showing how to check the interfaces, the ethernet l2 traffic, how the DLSw peers, and then the establishment of the circuit once the session is established.

But I wanted to be quick. I don’t think I can edit a video that is up so I’ll probably follow it up with another quick video.

simple network diagram

Trying to put it into words, the Windows 3.1 VM hosts Extra! 4.2 talking SNA to the Loop_SNA virtual Ethernet interface, which then is connected to the virtual cisco router, which also has a TCP/IP enabled interface, Loop_TCPIP, which the host Windows 10 machine can talk to, allowing it to communicate with the Hercules VM which I had compiled to run as a native Win64 EXE for Windows.

Basically, at it’s heart, this is the important part of the cisco config:

source-bridge ring-group 1
dlsw local-peer peer-id 192.168.146.5
dlsw remote-peer 0 tcp 192.168.146.1
dlsw mac-addr 4000.1020.0100 remote-peer ip-address 192.168.146.1
dlsw udp-disable
dlsw transparent switch-support

interface FastEthernet0/0
 ip address 192.168.146.5 255.255.255.0
 no shut

interface Ethernet1/0
 dlsw transparent redundancy-enable 5555.5555.5000
 dlsw transparent map local-mac 4000.1020.0100  remote-mac 4000.0999.0100
 no shut

I used a ‘clean’ VMware virtual machine to host this test, just to show how to do the setup from scratch, taking nothing for granted.

Hopefully this explains it a bit better for those who wanted to know, along with the video to show the high level of it working. Not sure anyone would want to watch me stumble through setting up MVS, along with going into more detail on the cisco config & workstation config.

As always, thanks to 9track for providing the patches, and showing that this whole setup was possible!

Installing NetManage Chameleon on Windows 3.0!

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.

qemu.exe -L pc-bios ^
-m 16 ^
-hda apricot.vmdk ^
-net nic,model=pcnet -net user ^
-monitor telnet:127.0.0.1:4000,server,nowait ^
-serial telnet:127.0.0.1:4001,server,nowait ^
-fda yourdisk_here.vfd

Surprisingly it went surprisingly well, other than my goof of having the OS/2 driver instead of the MS-DOS driver for the nic.

Sadly, the tn3270 program bundled with Chameleon doesn’t work properly with Hercules.

As always I’ve uploaded it to archive.org: apricot-dos4-win3-chameleon3.7z

The Rise of Unix. The Seeds of its Fall. / A Chronicle of the Unix Wars

It’s not mine, rather it’s Asianometry‘s. It’s a nice overview of the rise of Unix. I’d recommend checking it out, it’s pretty good. And of course, as I’m referenced!

The Rise of Unix. The Seeds of its Fall.

And part 2: A Chronicle of the Unix Wars

A Chronicle of the Unix Wars (youtube.com)

Years ago I had tried to make these old OS’s accessible to the masses with a simple windows installer where you could click & run these ancient artifacts. Say 4.2BSD.

Download BSD4.2-install-0.3.exe (Ancient UNIX/BSD emulation on Windows) (sourceforge.net)

Installing should be pretty straight forward, I just put the license as a click through and accept defaults.

Starting BSD via ‘RUN BSD42’ and the emulator will fire up, and being up a console program (Tera Term) giving you the console access. Windows will probably warn you that it requested network access. This will allow you to access the VAX over the network, including being able to telnet into the VAX via ‘Attach a PTY’ which will spawn another Tera Term, prompting you to login.

telnettting into the VAX

You can login as root, there is no password, and now you are up and running your virtual VAX with 4.2BSD!

All the items

I converted many of the old documents into PDF’s so you may want to start with the Beginners guide to Unix. I thought this was a great way to bring a complex system to the masses, but I’m not sure if I succeded.

776 downloads

As it sits now, since 2007 it’s had 776 downloads. I’d never really gotten any feedback so I’d hoped it got at least a few people launched into the bewildering world of ancient Unix. Of course I tried to make many more packages but I’d been unsure if any of them went anywhere. It’s why I found these videos so interesting as at least the image artifacts got used for something!

But in the off hand, maybe this can encourage some Unix curious into a larger world.

Other downloads in the same scope are:

Enjoy!

Joining NT 4 to a SAMBA Domain Controller

or the Unbridled rage of living on the trailing edge.

I hosted a Porting Party last where where I setup my Dec Alpha as a terminal server allowing people from all over the world to connect in and cross compile software for the 64bit version of Windows for the Dec Alpha. While many problems were overcome, and many more remain, I have to say the most annoying thing was joining a domain hosted by a SAMBA server.

In my mind, I though the easiest way to get files in & out of the Alpha was not to use something like IIS/FTP where it would probably lead to end-less issues with text/binary/active/passive modes, but rather I should rent a VPS, install the OS default SAMBA and just map drives. The benefit of the VPS is that it has a public address, so no NAT is required. The VPS had an option for either CentOS (no) or Debian 10. I went with the Debian, and did an in place upgrade to 11, then 12. Nothing special.

I’d never actually used SAMBA as a domain controller before, but I thought this would be a fun experiment. So the idea is then that the VPS running SAMBA is the Domain Controller, and my Alpha joins it as a member server. Everyone else can use Windows or any SAMBA client and map drives, and then copy files to the VPS, and then copy back and forth from the Alpha to the VPS. This part worked fine.

What didn’t work was SAMBA version 4.

I had come up with this config, based on the fragments of the default config, and and hints from samba.org.

[global]
    netbios name = PDC
    passdb backend = tdbsam
    server max protocol = NT1
    username map = /usr/local/samba/etc/username.map
    workgroup = ALPHAPARTY
    server string = Samba Server
    security = user
    hosts allow = 127.0.0.1, <<<peoples networks...>>>
    load printers = yes
    log file = /usr/local/samba/var/log.%m
    max log size = 50
    passdb backend = tdbsam
    local master = yes
    os level = 33
    domain master = yes
    preferred master = yes
    domain logons = yes
    wins support = yes
    dns proxy = no
    add user script = /usr/sbin/useradd %u
    add group script = /usr/sbin/groupadd %g
    add machine script = /usr/sbin/adduser -n -g machines -c Machine -d /dev/null -s /bin/false %u
    delete user script = /usr/sbin/userdel %u
    delete user from group script = /usr/sbin/deluser %u %g
    delete group script = /usr/sbin/groupdel %g
[homes]
    comment = Home Directories
    browseable = no
    writable = yes
[printers]
    comment = All Printers
    path = /usr/spool/samba
    browseable = no
    guest ok = no
    writable = no
    printable = yes
[public]
    comment = share for everyone
    path = /public
    public = yes
    writable = yes
    printable = no
    creaet mask = 0777

I had endless issues with the machine account not being either created correctly or not being authenticated. I tried manually creating it, to no avail. No matter what I tried it didn’t work.

Working with NT 4.0 must be depreciated or something but no matter what I tried IT JUST DIDN’T WORK.

Feeling outraged, I purged the old Samba, downloaded the source code to 3.6.25, built that, and using the same configuration I had tried to put together, it just worked.

Dec Alpha joining the SMB Domain

Adding users was somewhat straight forward:


useradd -M -s /bin/bash neozeed
passwd neozeed
/usr/local/samba/bin/smbpasswd -a neozeed
/usr/local/samba/bin/smbpasswd -e neozeed
mkdir /home/neozeed
chown neozeed /home/neozeed/

Creating both a Linux user & directory, and the SAMBA credentials. On the terminal server, all that remains was assigning a local home directory & profile directories, as you really don’t want those over the WAN.

I have no idea if this is a warning to others, or whatever the larger issue is.

Porting Party II

At any rate I’ll be running another porting party this coming weekend. I can host cross compiling fine, but we need people with the 64bit Whistler beta installed to test. The best way to get details is over on discord. Lately the IRC bridge is down more than it’s up, and I can’t effectively send out passwords & get your network block to allow access to the RDP, since I’m not going to open up worldwide access to a Windows NT 4.0 SP5 machine.

Porting Party II

So for anyone interested in porting their C/C++ to either the 32bit Alpha Windows, or 64bit Alpha Windows come join us on discord!

I’ll fire up the Alpha on Friday afternoon GMT and expect the event to run all weekend!

Microsoft’s Netware emulators

First thing to take care of, is if you have the old pcap on Windows running around. If you have it, you’ll know as you’ll get spammed with “FATAL Bad Memory Block.”, although things will continue to operate just fine.

Win10Pcap!
C:\dynamips\netware\qemu-0.90-pcap-client>qemu -m 16 -L pc-bios -M isapc -hda client.disk -soundhw sb16,adlib -net nic,macaddr=52:24:00:22:00:01 -net pcap,devicename={BFA868ED-E508-4436-B085-EC815C4C544C}
Eth: opened {BFA868ED-E508-4436-B085-EC815C4C544C}
Could not open '\\.\kqemu' - QEMU acceleration layer not activated
FATAL Bad Memory Block.
FATAL Bad Memory Block.
FATAL Bad Memory Block.
FATAL Bad Memory Block.

So be sure to dump that for the one over on npcap!

The old times, actually running Netware 3.12

There was a time when Windows NT didn’t dominate the 1990’s data centre. Instead as a carryover from the 1980’s the majority of corporate LANS were instead based on Netware. And the only way Windows NT was going to make space in this environment was to dress up in sheep’s clothes and mingle among them unnoticed. That brings us to this GEM:

Services for NetWare

This fun CD will let our NT 4.0 server emulate a NetWare server! The first thing in one of these stealth migrations was to just join the existing network.

The existing network is 0C0FFCAB

In order to do this, the two bits of information we need is the frame type, since NetWare supports so many, and the network address. In this case its 0C0FFCAB.

default IPX is no good

By default the NT server will just listen to the network, and participate on what it sees. This is fine if you are just playing along as a dynamic node, but being a NetWare node requires you to step it up, and have these values set, as it is very possible that you could be the first one (or only one) live on the network, and you don’t want clients trying to think on their own.

I also gave mine an internal network number of 1381, because you know, it’s NT 4.0.

To add the FPNW, you need to add it as a new service. Just tell it you have a disk

You’ll then have to point it to the path of the install. This is honestly the hardest part.

Selecting the first option will install the NetWare Server emulation on the NT server.

I went ahead and named my NetWare emulation as SHEEP, as I NT to blend into the existing NetWare network, with nobody being the wiser.

indeed, on our client that was already connected to the Qemu server before I built WOLF, I ran an slist command to show all the servers on the network, and there is my Wolf in Sheep’s clothes.

Creating NetWare compatible volumes is done in the Server Manager, under the FPNW option. It’s pretty self explanatory, nothing too exciting there.

The truth is during the period where this was important the NT 3.51-40 timeframe, NetWare was still a dominant force. But once Windows 95 had launched, and the explosion of people wanting MORE, the natural interest of people going to NT was just amazing to see in corporate space. While there was an early beta of the newshell for NT 3.51, when NT 4.0 shipped it was just amazing as all the reservations for running NT had just evaporated. We’d gone from hiding among the sheep to full on eating them all. It was staggering how fast we were backing up NetWare volumes to only re-format the servers to NT, and get people converted to using them. Before NT 4, the consensus was that rolling out the client config was going to be a nightmare, and that being able to emulate NetWare was the way to go, as it would just work (see the MS-DOS VM talking to NT with an unmodified NetWare client). Instead we saw a massive drive to Windows 95, which ended up changing the client landscape and upending NetWare completly.

About the most difficult thing was user mappings, there was tools to do this kind of thing, and I believe we had something to even proxy passwords, but it was easier to make people just login to the NT side.

Of course this is ONE of the emulators, you might be asking, okay, what is the other?

Why, it’s WINDOWS 95.

YES.

I’m joining the NT domain for the full experence, but the NetWare emulation relies on NetWare servers for authentication. You could use an actual NetWare server, or of course a FPNW server.

Adding file and printer sharing for NetWare workgroups under Windows 95 is done by adding a Service to the network stack. It’s even on the floppy version.

To maximize the functionality and the pain, be sure to turn on SAP Advertising. This way it’ll appear in server lists.

SAP on!

So with all of this in place, yes you can map drives from the MS-DOS client to the Windows 95 workstation acting as a server.

Mapping a drive on 95, authenticated by the WOLF hiding as a SHEEP

And there we go, I can now see the Windows 95 workstation on the SLIST, and connect and map drives. My user account of course exists on the NT side.

While professionally I didn’t rely too much on this feature, but it was nice in that era where you still had MS-DOS/MacOS/OS2 desktops with NetWare clients to quickly share stuff. But in a large organisation this would lead to major issues.

The fundamental flaw in NetWare is that there is no directory service. Instead, all the servers have to broadcast that they exist, along with what services they provide.

On my tiny demo network this isn’t that much traffic. But on a larger network that spans continents this becomes a problem. With thousands of servers there can be an incredible amount of this SAP announcement traffic. Since there is no directory service, the other problem is that when a new client is booted up, it’ll do what is known as a GNS or Get Nearest Server request in order to find the closest server to attach to, in order to facilitate a login. And EVERY server will reply.

And as you can see some servers even will reply more than once. And this can have other effects where people reboot servers during the day, something that is very natural for a Windows 95 user, which could create issues for other users, even forcing them to reboot! And yes, anecdotally I ran into this so many times where people with laptops with this feature turned on, and they would screw up the local office building (impacting hundreds of people). Even when they weren’t winning the GNS elections.they are still generating extra traffic, and occasionally they will win. This was another problem we had with all these wolves hiding in sheep’s clothing.

In the end, NetWare was utterly removed from the data center’s by the end of 1997. Windows NT just scaled too well for SMP and large disks (I had one server with 1TB! It was using 4GB disks it was massive!), along with being able to easily install stuff like SQL Server & SNA Server, unlike NetWare where any NLM conflict will bring the entire thing down. Not having a name lookup server was a giant pain, but the final nail was also in 1997 with the rise of the internet, and normal people now getting involved the entire LAN/WAN was going TCP/IP, where it had only been a fringe protocol used for managing cisco routers, and tftp/ftp some files around, Windows NT’s ability to encapsulate named pipes, and NETBIOS over TCP/IP let them embrace this new world where the TCP/IP stack on NetWare 3.12/4.11 was only good for sending SNMP alerts.

But don’t cry for NetWare, they made so much money they were able to coast for decades before being bought out in 2010 by a Mainframe Terminal Emulation company of all things, The Attachmate Group, who was later in turn bought out by Micro Focus, a COBOL language company. I guess in the end, the Mainframes won?

Building a 100% virtual SNA network on your desk!

So I have been fighting the Mainframe thing for a while (see part1/part2) and getting nowhere. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was working, but something on the mainframe side was broken. I just don’t know enough about MVS/VTAM on the host side. Although I have setup and deployed quite a few cisco routers in production doing remote ring groups, translational bridges, and the like, a DLSw connection to SDLC was something I’d never done as I’d always had direct token-ring access to the FrontEndProcessor.

On suspicion that I’ve been talking to the mainframe the whole time is that in the packet trace from Microsoft SNA server I’d see the string UNSUPPORTED FUNCTION in the capture.

Microsoft SNA Server

The LU goes online, but there just isn’t anything to be displayed. Traffic is constantly flowing but it’s always the same, a blank dead screen.

On a fluke I had spotted a copy of Attachmate Extra! 4.20 on eBay for $10. I was able to get someone to get it for me, and fence me a copy of the disks. Configuring Extra isn’t too involved, just set the terminal to type 4, and using the same block/destination address as all the others:

LU #3, and Model 4!

With the usual restricted I-Frame (MTU), and I turned everything on feature wise (it didn’t matter)

I had fired up both OS/2 & NT and with the same empty screen showing nothing. Next I loaded up Extra on Windows 95, and got this:

Unsupported Function
Unsupported Function

Well that was unexpected!

The 3705’s on Hercules can be connected to direclty, so I try c3270 and get this:

Wait, so my suspicion was right?!

I reset the mainframe, and then was greeted with the cat!

Finally!

So what was wrong?!? I’m still not so sure, but turning off the debug on DLSw, let me see that both OS/2 AND Windows NT crash out SNASOL with an abend code of U0020.

ABEND

I’m sure it means something to someone, but not to me. So this is one of those ‘dont do that if it hurts’ type things.

Since I had used Windows 95, as I figured it had more robust networking support than Windows 3.1

Setting up Windows 95 was a minor challenge as Extra! 4 is a Win16 application, and it’s DLC/802.2 support requires you to knock down the 32bit networking support to instead use the 16bit networking drivers. This is what let Extra! attach to it. Of course the following updates/files are needed for Windows 95 on Qemu:

the AMD PCnet driver is built in, so it works the best. Again, I have Dynamips & Qemu using the Microsoft Loopback as their common network, so I can do packet captures, and they both can communicate on the network.

So, of course the other question is, does it work with physical hardware?!

And YES it does!

If anything, using a terminal emulator that doesn’t crash out the host makes it seem all too easy. While I’ve seen SDLC PCI cards on ebay they are rather expensive, and does the ISA card really add anything that you could get over the LAN? Honestly no. Back in the day it really was just what you could get a hold of, and of course logically (virtually) setting stuff up made the 802.2 stuff all the easier to do, instead of leased lines, physical v35 cables, and all that other fun stuff.

With everything said & done, if you want to experience some pseudo fake SNA, go virtual. It’s far more portable, less cables involved, plus it’s self-contained making it more of a conversation piece.

All the hard work is being done by IOS, and it’s functionality like this is why cisco had established itself as king of the multiprotocol networking world. But everything is TCP/IP these days, and Cisco doesn’t commend the same enterprise place as it had once before, making this whole thing a middle point relic of the past. It’s far too new for real FEP/DLC networking, but everything now is TN32720 (telnet 3270).

I guess as a tip for people who buy physical routers is that those super expensive PCMCIA flash cards aren’t needed as long as you have enough RAM. One cool feature of the cisco routers is that the power on bootrom loads up a ‘boot’ version of IOS that is either also burned on ROM, or it’s also in FLASH. You have to remember it was super expensive back then so it may be only a few megabytes of space. The boot IOS can’t route or do anything too useful but it can load the proper IOS from various network sources into memory. My 7200 has one that supports FTP, so I could just drop IOS onto an anonymous ftp server at home.

I guess my ‘old man yells at the clouds’ is that I’ve had to deal with some bug in a remote site where the router didn’t have enough flash to store the image, and the Ethernet cards were too new for the boot IOS to drive, but we had an async card that did work, so I rebooted it to load production IOS over a T1. This one didn’t support FTP, rather it was TFTP, and it took about an hour to load. During that much time I didn’t have console access so I was getting ready to drive the 5 hours to the site, when I barely got onto the highway when I got the call that my ‘fix’ had worked and that the site was online. YAY.

I hope this has helped someone.

SDLC attempt #1

TL;DR it didn’t work, got the exact same result.

Well today was a special day, I got 2 deliveries, one PC SDLC card, and the other being the 4 port high speed serial card for my cisco 7200.

In case you were wondering what was the serial cable, its a CAB-232FC FEM DCE RS-232 cable looks like here is the DB-60 connector side:

And here is the DB-25 side.

VERY RS-232 isn’t it?

Connect the cable to the to the router! Easy!

The router doesn’t have any PCMCIA storage so I configured the thing to get it’s IOS from a FTP server.I have to say that netbooting works great.

Slot the card into the board I found in the trash that has an ISA slot, and we’re off to the races! I wanted try to replicate my NT setup, so Server 3.5 was installing when of course:

Of course this 400Mhz Celeron is going to break the lookup list as anything beyond Pentium is too much. 🙁 I just installed on Qemu instead, and used MS-DOS backup/restore. Yes it worked!

On the SNA server install, I used the IBM SDLC option hoping it was this card I’d bought. I got lucky it was!

Just like 9track.net I kept it ‘leased’ and no constant RTS.

One thing to note about this SDLC card is that it takes IRQ 4 & DMA 1. So there goes any hope of a Sound Blaster or COM1. It’s not the end of the world.

And of course, I got the exact same result as last time.

I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.

I can see the serial interface up and passing traffic, and the DLSW circuit builds and is established.

I’ll either edit this with more details, or just follow up. I’m tired, and my eyes are blurry. But I thought I’d post this much to the world.

Everyone seems to be losing their minds over the Windows XP Professional Key

algorithm being cracked.

But of course, how does that help me?

Unironically, I had purchased this for a whopping £4.68

No, really here’s the receipt. What a bargain!

Of course this is a legit copy with a legit key. But the online activation servers are all gone, and it looks like I’d have to call someone asking about my 22 year old copy of Windows, that I’ll load up and quickly forget.

Since I’m going to use QEMU, 0.90 with pcap support I thought I’d share the startup options:

set loopback=\Device\NPF_{3DF0EC5D-7FBE-46DF-ACF8-EF5D8679A473}
set vmnet1=\Device\NPF_{3BC364F4-5A15-405D-926C-C594383F0323}
qemu -m 512 -L pc-bios ^
-hda xphome.vmdk ^
-soundhw es1370 ^
-net nic,model=pcnet,macaddr=52:24:00:33:00:01 ^
-net pcap,devicename=%loopback% ^
%1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6

I had high hopes for this thing. Clearly misplaced ambitions.

First up, it’s an upgrade version. So that means instead of installing XP I had to waste my time installing NT Workstation 3.51, then installing XP. Yuck. And of course it just want small FAT disks of the 2/4 gigabyte boundary type as it’s 1994. Not the bright future of 2002’s Windows XP.

I don’t know why Qemu 0.90 has issues with XP detecting the CD-ROM drive, but yeah that sucked. I wanted to load up some more insane SNA experiments, but there is no DLC / 802.2 driver for XP Home. wow.

At least once it’s satisfied, we can format the disk as one big happy partition, and we can get on with our lives.

Installation is rather uneventful, however we are instantly reminded that we have only 30 days to go. Since we have that nasty CD-ROM issue that means shutting down, and booting back up, but with this fun program on an ISO image, xp_activate.

I did try to make a call, to activate my Windows, but the connection was terrible and I’m not even sure if these numbers were right. No I mean I know they didn’t work.

So I did what all legit users end up doing, using the crack for my 21 year old copy of Windows.

And just a few clicks later, it was done.

Windows XP Home is activated.

I don’t know if it’s even really going to last, I didn’t try anything else, actually I already deleted it. And the XP folio is back on the bookshelf.

Not only is there no DLC, did you know you can’t uninstall TCP/IP? At least you can unbind it from your NIC. While it does have IPX/SPX there is no built in Netware client. When they said HOME they meant it!