Well I was looking for a way to move data out of the 386BSD vm without too much pain, and I’ve just been hitting this brick wall about trying to compile apache.
You see the thing is, 386BSD is so old, it doesn’t have dynamic libraries, and a uname command so you have to ‘fool’ the configure scripts, and even then if you do manage to get an executable it’ll just crash… For some reason gdb couldn’t help with the whole thing… very annoying. I think it may be a program size limit..? Either way, I’m sure it was ‘fixed’ in NetBSD 0.8 ..
So after googling around the ancient news groups, I came across this post..
NCSA httpd 1.1/1.2/1.3 compile straight (well almost) out of the box. I’ve not tried the CERN one yet. I’m happy with my NCSA 1.3.
Well, now that’s interesting… Remember that NCSA gave us Mosaic, but they also gave us httpd, which apache is based on. However NCSA no longer hosts the httpd source code… It’s gone with the wind…. Except for this Slackware mirror.
So after downloading it, and building, naturally…. it crashed. However this time I was able to fire up GDB, and see that it was crashing in the mime initialization… It seems it was using a null pointer… So for the heck of it, I changed the hash macro to use the 2nd definition, and it worked!!
So after all of that, I built some stuff for 386BSD to test the transfer of the web server, and it “seems” ok to me… Naturally I wouldn’t expect this to withstand any large amounts of traffic as it doesn’t seem to fork itself… I also suspect this version may work with the VAX 4.X BSD stuff as well…
httpd-1.3
com (CP/M emulator)
GNUMake-3.75
Frotz-2.32
screen-3.7.1
gcc-2.5.8
bash-1.14.7
bash-2.0
It is kind of scary how this old software is disappearing, and at the same time, we hear this promise of how we can keep everything forever in the “digital age”… At any rate, I guess this preserves a somewhat usable OS/Webserver configuration circa 1993…




