3 1/2″ disks vs the 5 1/4″ disks…

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So I’ve been talking with Frank Sapone about recovering old data and how I’ve had the worst luck with old 3 1/2″ disks.  Even sealed stuff like the MS-DOS client components of SQL Server 4.21a which Microsoft chose not to put on the CD-ROM, but rather on floppy diskette … which are not readable.

What is surprising is that not only has he had the same luck with 10-15 year old 3 1/2″ disks, but with 26 year old 5 1/4″ disks is that he can read them fine.

That is right, 26 year old  disks work fine with a good Panisonic 5 1/4″ drive mechanism, including a box of random disks he bought on e-bay that went through the old fashioned metal scanners, that he thought at best was a bulk lot of junk, he could read 100% of them with no errors.

I can only wonder how many people are sitting on ‘good media’ still factory sealed to only find out they are completely worthless.

If you’ve got old stuff, you better read it NOW… Otherwise it’ll probably never work, esp if it is 3 1/2″.

Dell 4100 networking kerfuffle!!!!

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So I’ve had this old Dell 4100 I’ve bought from the salvation army…

Anyways, if you look at the dell page..

You’ll see clearly that the networking component is a 3com 3c905c.

Instead, thanks to an OpenBSD cd-rom I was able to find out, that it is an Intel 82562 aka 100B.

Talk about way off the mark!  And at least I’ve managed to get my OS/2 2.11 backup’d and restored onto the disk..!

QuakeWorld for DOS updates..

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Remember my old Quake port to MS-DOS that included that WatTcp package so that you could play on the internet under glorious MS-DOS?  Well it’s kind of taken a life onto its own, and thanks to the hard work of Frank Sapone, it picked up all kinds of updates including:

Whew isn’t that great?

I’ll have to check to see how much of this I can backport to OS/2…

You can download it, and more here.  And in the meantime I’ve put up my server on 68.68.97.224 … Enjoy!

Microsoft vs Google.

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So I log onto an older XP VM, hit google, and blamo,  Google Exploit:JS/Blacole.BW .. What on earth is that? is google infected…???

So it seems this is just a false alarm, update your definitions and it’ll take care of the ‘problem’ …. But you have to wonder is there really someone on google, that MS forgot to whitelist..?  Much like how antivirus / spyware products will not show you government spyware…

Oh brave new world.

BBS is back online… again!

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Well it certainly is the trade off, hosting  in the ‘cloud’ means you really don’t own anything.  But at the same time it’s not subject to my less than par power, internet connection…

But as long as you remember to backup you can always fish data out, and get back online.  So I think its about a week stale, but its a heck of a lot better than down completely.

And I’ve got to rave about BlueVM, I was kind of bummed about my last VPS basically going under so I was thinking about giving up all together, when I found this offer for $1.50 USD a month!  So how could I go wrong??  So far the server feels nice & snappy, my Qemu processes is running without issue, and its already completed a sync with vert.synchro.net and I’m sure it’ll get back onto the list.

For people with flash enabled browsers, click here or just telnet to bbs.superglobalmegacorp.com ..

Storage past meets storage future…

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Tapes, tapes tapes, lots of tapes...

While talking to a friend we were mentioning how the lifespan of tapes really sucks, how you could have some tapes that easily surpassed their lifespan of seven years, while some couldn’t last seven weeks. At some point in the business we’ve all seen it, some poor guy runs the local server backup to tape every night, they have a disaster, they call everyone they know for the tape backup program & OS as they’ve never tried to do a recovery before, and then you find out that the backups are all bogus because they forgot to format the tape, or some other nonsense and all the tapes are blank… They’ve never actually read the output of the backup program to know that they’ve backed up nothing.

At least we were able to send out the disks for repair and got back the vast majority of the data, but having the false assumption that they had good backups is the worst.

In the picture the idea is that the single DAT tape can hold the capacity of all the other tapes, but tapes are not only picky creatures, they can easily break giving you gaps in your data…

IMHO the only ‘workable’ backup is to hard disk, and those should be mirrored… Don’t use USB or ‘consumer’ grade stuff, those disks wont last five years let alone 30… And keep getting new disks and copying stuff up.  Sigh.

As easy as it is to watch everyone get locked out of new ‘cloud’ based software, it is just as easy  to get locked out of old stuff.  Make ISO images of your CD’s just in case.  Keep text files of your license information, email it to yourself!  It is far too easy to get locked out.  And as vendors move on, all they’ll sell you is new stuff that very well won’t work with your old data.