It’s been a few years since Tenox had mentioned OpenNT 4.5, and in that time the project pages, repositories and well just about everything has vanished. It seems that the hardest thing to do with OpenNT had become finding it.
Then I found this over on vetusware, and with my curiosity piqued, I thought I’d check it out.
As mentioned the first thing to do is combine the parts, and create the single 7zip file, and then extract that.
Extracting that will give a simple ISO file, weighing in at 1.7GB!
While not obvious at first, there is a readme in the ISO that provides instructions on how to compile it. Basically it boils down to a few main points:
xcopy the CD onto a ‘W’ drive, or subst any other drive to ‘W’ as apparently the build process requires it to be on W. Did I mention that the CD needs to be copied onto the W drive?
Run the ‘setup.cmd’ file to configure the environment and get the build process ready
run zTESTBUILD and do a clean build. It will run and eventually fail.
run zTESTBUILD again, but do not do the clean build, and it should finish
run \cdimg\genall to create the ISO image
So with those points basically figured out after the fact, let’s go!
The first thing to do is either create a VM to compile this in, or just xcopy and go. The big requirement though is that it must be a 32bit version of Windows, as part of the build process requires the ability to use NTVDM. For simplicity sake, I chose Windows 2000 server, so I could allocate 2GB of RAM, and 4 CPU cores. During the build it doesn’t use that much memory, cores are more so important during various phases of the build that can seemingly use any and all cores, while various other parts only run on a single core.
OpenNT disk space after a build.
I chose to use a separate ‘C’ drive, and ‘W’ drive for the 2000 VM. With no idea how much space to give it, I setup a 32GB W drive, which after the build takes up just under 4GB of space. Â
With the VM installed, and the W drive formatted, and the contents of the CD copied over, it’s time to start the build.
Phase 1
So basically you just answer ‘Y’ to zTESTBUILD.cmd and it’ll do it’s thing. For me this took about 42 minutes for this to run until it failed, as expected.
Failure building MVDM
Looking at the \binaries\nt directory there was now 1,274 files currently built. Naturally with the failure this is not a complete build.
Starting phase 2
After this failure you then re-run zTESTBUILD.cmd but this time answer ‘No’ to the clean build.
This step took about 15 minutes to complete.
The \binaries\nt directory now has 1293 files.
Checking the binaries\nt directory there is now 1,293 files and looking at the entire directory there is 2,624 files taking up about 120MB of space.
With the OS compiled, all that remains is to create an install CD and boot it up. running \cdimg\genall.cmd will create the ISO image.
Creating the ISO with CDIMAGE 2.47
This will compress almost all the files, and took another 15 minutes to create the CD. After this is all done it’s just a matter of setting up a VM to run the NT45Wks.iso file.
Bluescreen bootup of OpenNT 4.5
The first thing you notice is the extra banners on OpenNT 4.5, when compared to a retail copy of NT 4.0.
OpenNT Project
And of course the different branding during setup. One of the nice things about OpenNT is that it can format filesystems directly as NTFS, instead of the old way of first creating a FAT partition, and converting it to NTFS. This ought to bypass all the limitations of disk/partition sizes for the older NT.
WOW Crash
Running OpenNT 4.5 on VMWare seemed to run the Win32 stuff okay, although Win16/WOW stuff immediately crashed, and MS-DOS was incredibly slow with screen redraw issues. I know that NT 4.0 builds prior to SP 6 have issues with many newer emulation/hypervisors even when CPU levels are set to regular Pentium.
MS-DOS DPMI stuff like DooM are incredibly slow, and seemingly lock up when launching.
Well it turns out that by turning on all the SDK stuff for Windows 10, including the mobile dev, which includes the Windows phone emulator it naturally uses Hyper-V.
Hyper-V Hypervisor enabled
And obviously the two hypervisor’s wont play nice with each-other. You could just disable it, and go back and forth re-enabling it when needed, or make a new boot selection without it!
C:\> bcdedit /copy {current} /d "No Hyper-V"
The entry was successfully copied to {ff-23-113-824e-5c5144ea}.
C:\> bcdedit /set {ff-23-113-824e-5c5144ea} hypervisorlaunchtype off
The operation completed successfully.
note: The ID generated from the first command is what you use in the second one. Don’t just run it verbatim.
When you restart, you’ll then just see a menu with two options…
Windows 10
No Hyper-V
Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it?
BCD Boot menu
And just like that on power up, I can switch between Hyper-v and no Hyper-V.
Oh yeah with the latest version of Windows 10 (October 2018) I had to list the BCD table with:
bcdedit /enum ACTIVE /v
As after the upgrade it had tagged both of my boot selections to enable Hyper-V everywhere. I had to delete the #2 entry and re-create the no hyperv dance. {current} doesn’t work anymore.
I didn’t do anything to set this up. I just searched for ISQLW and for some reason this ancient one showed up in the search path, and it connected. I didn’t notice it at first until it didn’t like the newer shift insert/delete operations, as back then you needed to use Control C/V ..Â
Not being able to stop there, I fired up the admin tool. It complains that the stored procedure sp_MSAdmin_version is missing. However you can go ahead and create it…
create procedure sp_MSAdmin_version as select “Microsoft SQL Administrator script version 4.20.22.1” go
And it’ll connect.
Yes you can track stats in sort of real time
Oddly enough things that talk to the server work okay. Things related to the databases don’t work at all.
SQLServer 2017 on Linux users
I even can admin users from 4.21’s admin program.
I guess the sp_MSAdmin_* scripts could be fixed up for 2017, allowing for a more robust experience, but I really can’t think of any reason why to do it. I’m more surprised that all the new ODBC drivers since Vista won’t talk to SQL Server 4.21, 6.0, & 7.0, but it seems the client tools can talk to the new server.
I’ve even created the infamous ‘PUBS’ database from the 4.21a script as well. Again not very useful, but all the more fun!
PUBS
Installation wasn’t too hard, but a little weird to re-produce. Anyways you’ll need to trust the MS key
And then I added this into the /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb [arch=amd64] https://packages.microsoft.com/debian/9/prod stretch main
deb [arch=amd64] https://packages.microsoft.com/ubuntu/16.04/mssql-server-2017 xenial main
And then run the following to download MSSQL & the needed bits. It’ll prompt a few times to agree to the License:
And if everything goes correctly you will then be prompted for the edition to use, the SA password, and then you can start the server with:
systemctl restart mssql-server.service
And away you go.
My output was like this:
# cat /etc/issue
Debian GNU/Linux 9 \n \l
root@Junk:/# apt-get update;apt-get upgrade
Hit:1 http://security.debian.org stretch/updates InRelease
Ign:2 http://debian.uchicago.edu/debian stretch InRelease
Hit:3 http://debian.uchicago.edu/debian stretch Release
Hit:4 https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian stable InRelease
Hit:5 http://ftp.debian.org/debian stretch-backports InRelease
Hit:7 https://deb.nodesource.com/node_8.x stretch InRelease
Hit:8 https://packages.microsoft.com/debian/9/prod stretch InRelease
Hit:9 https://packages.microsoft.com/ubuntu/16.04/mssql-server-2017 xenial InRelease
Reading package lists... Done
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
root@Junk:/# apt-get install mssql-tools mssql-server
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
libc++1 libodbc1 libsss-nss-idmap0 libunwind8 msodbcsql17 odbcinst odbcinst1debian2 unixodbc
Suggested packages:
clang libmyodbc odbc-postgresql tdsodbc unixodbc-bin
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libc++1 libodbc1 libsss-nss-idmap0 libunwind8 msodbcsql17 mssql-server mssql-tools odbcinst odbcinst1debian2 unixodbc
0 upgraded, 10 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/181 MB of archives.
After this operation, 932 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Preconfiguring packages ...
Selecting previously unselected package libc++1:amd64.
(Reading database ... 53362 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../0-libc++1_3.5-2_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking libc++1:amd64 (3.5-2) ...
Selecting previously unselected package libodbc1:amd64.
Preparing to unpack .../1-libodbc1_2.3.4-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking libodbc1:amd64 (2.3.4-1) ...
Selecting previously unselected package libunwind8.
Preparing to unpack .../2-libunwind8_1.1-4.1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking libunwind8 (1.1-4.1) ...
Selecting previously unselected package odbcinst1debian2:amd64.
Preparing to unpack .../3-odbcinst1debian2_2.3.4-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking odbcinst1debian2:amd64 (2.3.4-1) ...
Selecting previously unselected package odbcinst.
Preparing to unpack .../4-odbcinst_2.3.4-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking odbcinst (2.3.4-1) ...
Selecting previously unselected package unixodbc.
Preparing to unpack .../5-unixodbc_2.3.4-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking unixodbc (2.3.4-1) ...
Selecting previously unselected package libsss-nss-idmap0.
Preparing to unpack .../6-libsss-nss-idmap0_1.15.0-3_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking libsss-nss-idmap0 (1.15.0-3) ...
Selecting previously unselected package msodbcsql17.
Preparing to unpack .../7-msodbcsql17_17.2.0.1-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking msodbcsql17 (17.2.0.1-1) ...
Selecting previously unselected package mssql-server.
Preparing to unpack .../8-mssql-server_14.0.3037.1-2_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking mssql-server (14.0.3037.1-2) ...
Selecting previously unselected package mssql-tools.
Preparing to unpack .../9-mssql-tools_17.2.0.1-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking mssql-tools (17.2.0.1-1) ...
Setting up libsss-nss-idmap0 (1.15.0-3) ...
Setting up libodbc1:amd64 (2.3.4-1) ...
Setting up libunwind8 (1.1-4.1) ...
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.24-11+deb9u3) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.7.6.1-2) ...
Setting up libc++1:amd64 (3.5-2) ...
Setting up mssql-server (14.0.3037.1-2) ...
Setting up odbcinst1debian2:amd64 (2.3.4-1) ...
Setting up odbcinst (2.3.4-1) ...
Setting up unixodbc (2.3.4-1) ...
Setting up msodbcsql17 (17.2.0.1-1) ...
Setting up mssql-tools (17.2.0.1-1) ...
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.24-11+deb9u3) ...
root@Junk:/# /opt/mssql/bin/mssql-conf setup
Choose an edition of SQL Server:
1) Evaluation (free, no production use rights, 180-day limit)
2) Developer (free, no production use rights)
3) Express (free)
4) Web (PAID)
5) Standard (PAID)
6) Enterprise (PAID)
7) Enterprise Core (PAID)
8) I bought a license through a retail sales channel and have a product key to enter.
Details about editions can be found at
https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=852748&clcid=0x409
Use of PAID editions of this software requires separate licensing through a
Microsoft Volume Licensing program.
By choosing a PAID edition, you are verifying that you have the appropriate
number of licenses in place to install and run this software.
Enter your edition(1-8): 2
The license terms for this product can be found in
/usr/share/doc/mssql-server or downloaded from:
https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=855862&clcid=0x409
The privacy statement can be viewed at:
https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=853010&clcid=0x409
Do you accept the license terms? [Yes/No]:yes
Enter the SQL Server system administrator password:
Confirm the SQL Server system administrator password:
Configuring SQL Server...
ForceFlush is enabled for this instance.
ForceFlush feature is enabled for log durability.
Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/mssql-server.service → /lib/systemd/system/mssql-server.service.
Additionally you may not want to listen on every single IP address, but rather only on the loopback. So you would run this to configure the listening address:
/opt/mssql/bin/mssql-conf set network.ipaddress 127.0.0.1
I also use the SQL Agent, to enable that just simply run this:
/opt/mssql/bin/mssql-conf set sqlagent.enabled true
systemctl restart mssql-server
I kept on getting this error which I didn’t see any way to cleanly resolve to fix for running MSSQL on Debian. The best hint is the OpenSSL is either too new (unlikely) or too old (far too likely). Instead I just changed distros as that is what people do, they don’t troubleshoot problems in Linux, just change distros so why bother fighting it?
# /opt/mssql-tools/bin/sqlcmd -Usa -PMYPa55w0rd!# -S127.0.0.1
Sqlcmd: Error: Microsoft ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server : TCP Provider: Error code 0x2746.
Sqlcmd: Error: Microsoft ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server : Client unable to establish connection.
OpenSSL?
Going further though, as much as I liked Debian it really does run better on Ubuntu. So as an addendum, use these sources (at the moment!). Since the SQL Agent wouldn’t run, and I couldn’t connect locally it was worse than useless.
deb [arch=amd64] https://packages.microsoft.com/ubuntu/16.04//prod xenial main
deb [arch=amd64] https://packages.microsoft.com/ubuntu/16.04/mssql-server-2017 xenial main
Now the first time I tried to do anything on Ubuntu I got this lovely error:
# /opt/mssql-tools/bin/sqlcmd
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::runtime_error'
what(): locale::facet::_S_create_c_locale name not valid
And it just hung the process. I had to control-Z & kill -9 %1 it to get it out of the way. Well it turns out that this VM didn’t have it’s locale set. Fixing that was pretty simple, once you know how:
Another thing that really bugs me is the lack of cryptography by default. So I found this nice recipie to for setting it up quickly. Just watch your hostname!
While I’m writing this, I’m listening to Neuromancer via WinAmp & the ancient Speex plugin I had updated about 8 years ago.
x86 node running on Windows RT
I took my Surface, and downgraded it to the North American 8.0 version without updates, added my MS ID, and from there ran the jailbreak and win86emu (sometimes called x86node) and from there I was able to run some simple Win32 exe’s.
Even though I had done a simple cut down QuakeWorld port with the GDI only display, using win86emu it’ll run the 80386 build as well. while I haven’t thrown much at it, I’m just amazed that so far things are working.
When you think that between the jail-break to unlock the ability to run programs combined with a CPU translator, and Win32 to Win32 thunk / translation program, why on earth did this thing ship without it? It’s amazing that between trying to launch a platform with no inertial for applications after Android & Apple were selling millions of hardware units, and billions of software units, and cutting the past applications. It’s just crazy.
And then Microsoft did their normal thing when something goes wrong, which is basically end it, and destroy all evidence it existed. There is no Windows 10 upgrade for the Surface, even though Windows 10 IOT has been hacked to run from a USB stick on the Surface, but it’s insanely slow.
People were excited, but then kind of dismayed as they couldn’t really do much with it. Oddly enough the source code release really didn’t have any notes on how to build it, although everything needed is included. I went looking for information on how to build Word to see why it keeps doing weird things on WineVDM, and I came across this thread on betaarchive:
Special props to yksoft1 for getting it to build in the first place, and Ringding for noticing that the OS/2 supplied compiler binaries can be re-bound to run under MS-DOS using a MS-DOS Extender.
So I went ahead and fired up Qemu and within an hour I had done it!
Word 1.1a compiled and on Windows 2.11
Well this is great fun, and all, but there isn’t a heck of a lof of people with Windows 2.x around anymore. And of course Word 1.1a really wanted to have 2.11 or higher. It has some hooks for what would be Windows 3.0 although I think it was much more. Although it certainly doesn’t want to run (unmodified) under debug release 1.14.
So now that the world has gone beyond Win16 OS’s what can you do?
Well the tip of WineVDM will run it!
Word 1.1a on Windows 10 using WineVDM
So now there is some new life for this old word processor.
Another fun thing in Word 1.1a is that it has an early implementation of MDI letting you view and work with several documents at once. Naturally you would need a massive monitor, which we all have today. Although people tend to just launch more than one copy of Word to accomplish this.
Early MDI
So now on my 64bit machine I can not only play with the source to Word, but I can run it at unimaginable resolutions on my modern machine!
I was able to port over some trivial stuff, the usual things like hello world, Infocom Interpreter, a f2c build of Dungeon, then I went with something I’d been messing around an old GDI driver for WinQuake that builds with the NT 3.5 SDK (finally got it!). So with a few minor tweeks here it is cross compiled from my x86_64 to the surface.
Last time I talked about the Surface was nearly 6 years ago… The platform’s fate was pretty much sealed on day one. With no open Win32 API it shunned traditional devs, and with some completely new and insane model it was such a hurdle for new devs, why put so much effort into such an old tired company like Microsoft?
I figured for the price of a good lunch it’d be a fun toy.
Too bad the speakers don’t work though.
I know the window on Windows 8.1 apps is closing soon. I should put something together for the dead platform. Maybe for phone too. But for tonight, it was kinda fun doing a copy/paste attack to then run unsigned EXE’s on the device.
I might upload the tool chain later, but at the moment getting Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate is a breeze.
So as part of my fun day job stuff involves moving data around and from time to time, there is that proverbial server in the corner (in this case it’s even physical!) and in this case I needed to move stuff into an old version of SQL Server as I needed to remember how to use the older BCP syntax. Obviously I guess I could have just installed 6.5 into a VM, did the SQL transfer, then the whole upgrade to 7/2000 and up to something modern, but per requirements I needed to check data in the middle, so the quickest way is to just BCP it out into something human readable, and BCP it into something new.
SQL Server Books Online on Windows 10
So it turns out the books are easily copied off the install CD, and just run the viewer application directly. And even better the ‘massive and optional’ install of all the online documentation turns out to be absolutely trivial by modern standards.
As you can see it’s really not that much in the world of terabyte disks. Anyways just copy out all the SQLBOOKS* files and then from the binn directory grab the INFOVIEW program. To view the books just run “INFOVIEW SQLBOOKS.MVB” and you’ll be set!
Some of the other older tools like Visual C++ 4.x also use this InfoViewer format, and you can copy all the other associated files, in the off chance you want to keep this ancient stuff handy.
You’ve probably seen this iconic image everywhere at one point. This is Charles O’Rear’s picture simply titled ‘bliss’ that was bought by Microsoft in 2000 and used as the default wallpaper for Windows XP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVXY8OEZAEQ
Interview with Charles
I found this interview of him recently and thought it was interesting enough for a quick post.
And what better way to celebrate by breaking out some ancient source and get it running!
I thought I’d take a stab at irc 2.1 first. You can find the source archived on darenet.org, among other places. And no doubt what made IRC popular was that not only was the protocol open (like Gopher) and the software was free without restriction except for commercial use (like Gopher).
**
** IRC - Internet Relay Chat
**
** Author: Jarkko Oikarinen
** Internet: [email protected]
** UUCP: ...!mcvax!tut!oulu!jto
** BITNET: toljto at finou
**
** Copyright 1988, 1989 by Jarkko Oikarinen and
** University of Oulu, Computing Center
**
** All rights reserved
**
** Permission is hereby granted to use and distribute this program freely.
** Permission to use this program for commercial purposes and in
** commercial Bulletin Board or similar systems is not given.
** Permission to modify this program and distribute modified version is
** not given. This copyright notice may not be modified or removed.
**
** IRC is provided 'as is', without warranty of any kind, either
** expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied
** merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. The entire
** risk as to the quality and performance of the program is with you.
** Should the IRC program prove defective, you assume the cost of all
** necessary servicing, repair or correction.
Using the Linux Subsystem for Windows and the Debian userland I was able to quickly get it to compile.
However the protocol has drifted too much, and you can’t join anything as the CHANNEL command has long since depreciated.
So not one to give up too easily I tried IRC 2.7h from 1991. This version is under the GPL v1 license, which removed the restrictions that were in place back in 1989.
Again getting this to compile wasn’t too much of a challenge, which just shows how good the code is, as building for a 64bit machine works no problem.
Connecting with IRC 2.7h
And unlike 2.1 this version is new enough you can connect to channels without modifying the client all that much. The server built as well, although I haven’t tested it at all, as setting up IRCD is way out of my reach. As much as I’d love to setup an isolated IRC system, I know it’ll end up being abused in strange ways so I haven’t bothered that much.
Naturally you would be INSANE to use this stuff on anything serious as I’m sure these clients are full of bugs, and have numerous issues. I’d HIGHLY recommend using stunnel to at least encrypt your connection.
If you have read this far, then I put the diffs up on sourceforge of all things. You can find it here: sourceforge.net/projects/ancientirconlinux/. I haven’t provided binaries as I mentioned this is no doubt highly insecure, and exploitable, and I’m going to at least raise the bar so you have to patch & compile it yourself. Although if you are capable of doing that much, you could have ported it yourself, after you look at my diffs.
