The collected works of Alver - Page 3

smj wrote:

Alver wrote: But once you go beyond the local disks in the machine - I don't see many local disks in machines anymore, except (sometimes) for OS - this kind of stuff tends to be pushed to the SAN... and those have data deduplication, CRC on block content, raid, hotspares, you name it.

Well no, I don't see much bulk DAS in the enterprise, but then they have real budgets and teams of people to make the SAN go. I shudder to think how big my employer's payroll is for the Storage Services team...

Quite storage is a big chunk of cash... but since it's been promoted to the biggest SPOF in a business, it makes sense not to hold back on investments there. Vicious circle really...

Some movies are so very bad that they are in fact enjoyable. I mean, half of the Schwarzenegger flicks fit into this cathegory.

PymbleSoftware wrote:

yetanother**ixuser wrote: poorest movie ever? not that i know anything about it...just requoting

I think "Machete Kills" and "Plan 9 from outter space" are possibly worse.

I dunno. I found the first "Machete" quite enjoyable. The whole movie was over the top and tongue-in-cheek - I hate movies that take themselves too seriously. And it's hard to hate Danny Trejo

Really, "Kill Bill", "Hot Shots", whatever, I feel utterly embarrassed for anyone in involved in the production of that rubbish and there seems to be a never ending spray (spew?) coming out of Hollywood lately.

Kill Bill was pretty damn good. Typical Tarantino - and if you don't like that, chances are slim you're ever going to like any of the movies he's involved in. But that doesn't mean they're bad movies at all.
If you want to talk about bad movies... try watching any of the "Twilight" movies. Seriously the story is written by someone on LSD, the acting is crap, the dialogues are crap, the effects are crap. Waste of bytes.

But, on topic RE: sharknado... I'm convinced no one involved in that movie ever took it seriously. It's just too much and yes, the acting was also crap, the story was hilariously retarded, etc, etc, etc. But if you watch it as "a director wanted to make a hilariously bad movie for kicks", it's enjoyable enough with the right company (and booze).

recondas wrote: http://www.google.com/search?q=aix+tutorial+for+beginners

http://www.google.com/search?q=forum+netiquette+for+newbies

And quite indeed, kudos on the couch. Gives me something to consider if I ever move to a house where I have more than 6 square meters to house my electronical toys in...

Post specs for Fuel and zx6000, perhaps - so people know what they're contemplating blowing their kids' college fund on

Da-yum... I shouldn't have asked my zx lacks a few bits & bobs to get on-par - I've got dual 1.5 CPUs, but lacking the Radeon 7500 (got a 7000, but works just so-so in VMS) and the iLO

wenp wrote: Evi Nemeth, original author of the famous Unix System Administration Handbook , was lost at sea last summer. Something that was commented on by those who knew her was how much she liked HP-UX and hated Solaris. While the Solaris bit wasn't unusual, I'd never heard of anyone loving HP-UX.

Well, you've just heard of the second one just now. I honestly love UX, and still use it at home for a desktop (although I haven't had much time for it at all since my son was born). It's a well-organized, reliable, pleasant to use system. Networking *is* dead easy, and rock solid (try playing with HPVM virtual switches on top of VLAN interfaces on top of trunks on top of physical cards - it's a breeze). Storage, since 11.31, is excellent as well - /dev/cdisk/ is every cluster admin's dream.

But I may be the slightest bit biased - you really never do get over your first Big Iron.

robespierre wrote: When emulating a computer, there is usually no upper limit to the amount of CPU consumed.
The emulator works on a "best-effort" basis, and runs the virtual CPU as fast as it can. This is not related to the useful work on the virtual CPU, since it probably busy-waits for something to happen (interrupts). In hardware you would keep the clock running all the time, and be ready to service an interrupt as soon as it happened. The only way to limit the (useless) consumption of host CPU resources is to engineer a completely new virtual "device" that does not exist in the original hardware at all, which stops the clock and everything else until something happens. This almost always requires a new device driver in the emulated OS.

I'm afraid (and foetz will be happy) that this statement is simply not true I have ultrix running in SIMH on Linux (ULTRIX V4.0 (Rev. 161) - and yes, SIMH exists on OSX as well) and it doesn't consume 100% CPU. It all comes down to how the emulator implements the idle instructions of the emulated OS/chip. I'm far from an expert on how these things get implemented, but rest assured, I've made sure none of my emulated VAXen had the 100% CPU issue before setting them loose 24/7.

foetz wrote: indeed that's good news
grabbed simh already and will give it a try ...

Make sure to get the "beta" 4.x simh, it's massively improved since the "old" 3.9 branch.

My ultrix simh vax.ini:



The disk and network stuff is specific, but you get the idea

dreadbit wrote: Hpux 11.23 is not very interesting for me because I own A500 server (and some 700-familiy machines), and 11.31... I'm not sure I want this computer to run it, I suppose there are much more interesting OSes.

BLASPHEMY!

dreadbit wrote: By the way, can anyone explain me the current legal status of obtaining OpenVMS? There is something called "Hobbyist license", but it's required to be a member of DECUS since 1978, or like that, but I've never been in touch with DEC legacy

Yep, the hobbyist program still exists, even though it's just one (great!) guy at HP that's pulling it. I'm not sure anyone cares about DECUS membership anymore - my own DECUS chapter dissolved one year after I joined, so I do still have a membership number, but I suppose you can get licenses without it. Try poking John Egolf at HP if joining a local chapter would turn out to be difficult.

I dual boot my zx6000 (basically a workstation rx2600) between HPUX 11.31 and VMS 8.4. Plenty fast and a nice machine to work on

Deep package inspection is a blessing and a curse - it's great for protecting your internet-facing services; it can block "malicious" stuff that is using legitimate ports and services (remember the old trick of running sshd on port 80?), but it's quite often implemented with one step too far... like doing SSL MITM to check whether a TCP/443 session is in fact encrypted HTTP and not some VPN or any other stream. I've had to jump through some hoops to dodge that kind of nasties at various customers.

For a home setup, I seriously wouldn't bother. I've got iptables on my openwrt home router and it does everything I need and more - I guess I could even run a proxy on it (but I don't see a need for it). Any low power Linux or BSD machine with minimal configuration could do that job.

For a company setup... well, better safe than sorry. Maybe a nosy inspecting firewall *is* what you want then.

HP/UX does not ask for licenses until you install a bundle that needs a license that your Operating Environment doesn't include. For a Base OE, that means you'll get the OS with some basic stuff here and there, but the fancy software will ask for a codeword. If you happen to have a copy of DCOE... well, virtually anything will install without asking questions.

And yes, that really isn't legal not even for development purposes. But as long as you don't run any production workloads on it, I doubt anyone will care.

I hope they get the VMS hobbyist site sorted out soon - my PAKs expire in 5-6 weeks or so, if memory serves me right... it's easy enough to generate your own, but I prefer to keep it 100% clean

logix wrote: By the way is it possible to get the latest/last patch kit 6? well it does not improve that much either way from patch kit 4 i'm using now.

It is definitely possible to find it... but you'd have to ask the right people on the right IRC channel unless you have a 5.1b4 kit from the (now deceased) Tru64 Hobbyist program, you still need a valid support contract to get it via the official channels.

robespierre wrote: DPI is useful for spying. It doesn't have much use for a firewall scenario.

I disagree. There are plenty of proper uses for DPI - as a matter of fact, I've only seen it being used for "spying" a couple of times, and always as a side effect of a proper use: checking for masked rogue traffic or exploit fingerprints in communication channels. Killing cross-site scripting and SQL injection attempts before they even hit the actual server is pretty nice.

Well, when it comes to HP-UX for IA64 builds, there is always the set of images on the HP FTP:

ftp://ftp.hp.com/ftp1/pub/openvms/openvmsft/

This looks like an OpenVMS dir with cryptic contents, but for the trained eye: 5014-1449 is the internal codename of HP-UX 11.31 Base OE DVD 1, and 5014-1450 is DVD 2. It won't get you very far for fancy apps (you'd need a better OE than Base for that), and of course you must have a valid support contract to use it, but HP has these images publicly online (they are aware of this, too; I've notified them when I still worked there, and got a response saying they knew, and they were there to stay). There's a couple of VMS images/files in there too, but those are outdated compared to the hobbyist provided ones, iirc.

The cards are dual port PCI-X 4Gbps fibrechannel adapters. I can't find much on them right away - but they're Integrity supported, which means any supported HP-UX on your machine will be able to use them, and VMS likely too (storage adapters are generally not the kind of boards that lack support across OSes).

Knuckx wrote: Thanks! They did not want to unpack from their zip file(s) though; I ended up using Universal Extractor, and even that complained...

There's z01 and z02 files too; I suppose they're multi-file zip archives, and you'll need all three to extract (the .zip files themselves are just over 1GB in size, which is way less than I remember for the isos.). I can't vouch for the images themselves, my machines run other OEs.

Knuckx wrote: Does it have a C compiler?

Nope. aCC comes separately, and requires a codeword (surprise ) but gcc for IA64 is quite good - I *do* have aCC, but I only use it rarely (most OSS code makes aCC barf... welcome to the world of GNUisms in code ). HP used to distribute an excellent aCC-built gcc depot on their own site, but I can't seem to locate it anymore (they may have pulled it). I've put the archive for gcc 4.7.0 up for grabs: https://upload.vanalboom.org . Use code 82UMG8SIBP6T7Q7SHS2I0YA2KHA513YO to get to the download button. Both 32bit HPPA, 64bit HPPA and (obviously 64bit) IA64 build are there.

Knuckx wrote: Sadly I don't have any other FC devices... I might see about selling them.

You can always try. Most people don't have FC at home though, so I'm not sure you'll find that many buyers.

I don't know if the previous version had it - if it had, I never noticed - but by golly, those notifications are *sweet*. I've reactivated the "old" theme just because I'm 80 years old mentally and don't like change, but even then, plenty of small unintrusive improvements that make the forum experience a lot better.

Great job, nekonoko

Hm, not even when all three files (.zip, .z01, .z02) are present? I'd give it a try, but I don't feel like pulling 4GB of data over the contractor DSL crap line

EDIT: well, I did pull it in, but over SSH to the home server... makes a difference in time. It is indeed a multi-file split zip. What to do (on Linux or OSX):


... and you get the .iso. Looks and mounts okay too:



Repeat for the other. Silly there isn't a way of using a pipe, but 3GB of extra temp disk space never killed anyone.

I have, of course, deleted the files right after testing them because I don't own the proper support contracts to run this particular OE.

foetz wrote: EDIT: no idea what version of zip you used but neither debian nor osx could handle it.

Eh, zip 3.0-3... debian oldstable

It's probably related to lack of support for large files on one of the fileservers at HP; it's obviously split in Windows zip - that can extract from a multi file zip directly. Linux unzip can't as of yet (since normally, no one uses it anyway...).

Dit it ever work with this specific hardware configuration, or is this a "new" HDD?

EDIT: nevermind, "old inst from disk" kind of answers that. Odd. Looks serious, too.

hamei wrote:

calvin wrote: wonder if it's the same ol' decade old php cruft inside though...

Probably. All that pointless garbage for a bunch of old dead operating systems, yuck

Hamei using irony? My god, the sky must be falling

Heh, interesting I have (had? hasn't been touched in a long long time...) pkgsrc on my Tru64, and it appears to work well; not using the DEC C/CXX though, iirc. If those softwares built fine with the proper compilers, maybe I should give pkgsrc another go.

I was really, really bored at work, so decided to look at the "286 and older" section of a local auction/ad site. Most of the stuff was crap - Pentium III boxes filed in the wrong category, vaguely old looking monitors, etc. But then I found "it"; it had been advertised for sale for well over two years, and the ad was still there. Three mails and two days later I was a silly bit of cash lighter and a strange thing richer.

Ladies & gentlemen, may I present to you: the Kanto Denshi Corporation Mugen Turbo portable computer


It is in fact very portable! I can lug it around without dislocating my shoulder. Not too bad.


Push, eh... well, why not.



Ta-dah! Behold the glory of a midget XT keyboard coupled with a single 5.25" floppy drive and a cute little CRT




The back side also had a handy sliding cover, and a hollow section to store the thick 230V cord in. Has serial, parallel, and what turned out to be a CGA card. I was hoping it would have been a Token Ring card, but alas.



640K RAM and IBM PC-DOS 3.20 seems to indicate it's a 8086, and somewhere 1986-ish.


Holy cow. It has a HDD - the full whopping 20MB! And besides Framework III, Lotus, dbase and a load more that I still need to investigate... C:\GAMES.

I had never heard of Kanto Denshi before; they still exist though! Seeing their corporate website it's not entirely surprising the name didn't ring a bell - 20 employees currently. They seem to be into industrial machinery and automation nowadays. I have not been able to find anything on this machine, full stop. That alone was reason enough to buy it.

But, seriously, has anyone ever heard of this machine? Got an idea where to find more information? I sent a mail to Kanto Denshi directly, but apart from an automated "thank you for mailing us" reply (in kanji, no less) it's been awfully quiet. The seller couldn't tell me much more than that the machine was used by financial auditors at a big local firm - there's oodles of traces of financial reports, tax dossiers, etc, etc, on the HDD. Gives you an idea how picky security was back then - nowadays (at least!) the HDD would have been crushed.

Anyway, not all is well though; the F7 key is broken. A bit of plastic was broken off. The broken-off bit was in the keyboard though, so maybe there's still hope. Or maybe this is a bog standard XT keyboard component and it can be fixed without a hassle - any advice is welcome.



Next to that, the "W" key also doesn't do much, although there is no visible breakage there. I've resisted the temptation to try to find out what's wrong with it, because the odds are high that I'd just make it worse.

Next up: installing the Ubuntu bootloader and kernel on it, net-loading the rest of the system over SLIP, making it run Unity and Firefox 34 and bitch my head off saying "modern software is shit because it doesn't run as fast on this as it does on my i7 laptop".

vishnu wrote: Is that Leisure Suit Larry I spy on the hard drive?

It appears to be the odd thing is that it launches and the music starts playing, but nothing ever shows up on the monitor. Might be that it needs that CGA card hooked up to a monitor.

The "PITSTOP.EXE" doesn't do much at all either - it launches, attempts to access the A: drive, then exits back to prompt. Guess it needs something on a floppy that I don't have.

jan-jaap wrote: I played that game in my first year in university That's probably the copy protection, it needs that floppy and if you wanted to make a copy you needed a special disk duplicator program.

Bummer I got a bunch of floppies with it, but none related to the pitstop.exe... guess it was lost somewhere in the last two decades. Luckily, I have plenty of other games from my other 8086.