was that WordStar possibly? Ah for the good old days... fit the OS (DOS 4.01), word processor and spreadsheet (Lotus 1-2-3 of course) all stored on the 5.25" full-height 10MB hard drive with plenty of room to spare for the text games =]
Well the older Maxtors have occasionally given me trouble, but the newer ones are fine - maybe because of the infusion of the tech they bought from Quantum. Heck, I just bought a 60gb Maxtor D-740x and the thing's got a Quantum-style case and everything, just with the Maxtor logo on it instead =]
Slackware has always used an unpatched kernel and managed to keep its high stability level intact... (the Reiser patch in Slack8 being the only exception I can remember, and it was unnecessary unless you were using a Reiser FS)
Of course you may not think Slack's a major distro, but there are those who would beg to differ;)
Daemon Tools, while definitely a useful program even without the cd-lock emulators, can only appear as a maximum of 4 virtual drives. The submitter needs much more (>= 200).
Actually I could use something like this as well, since the infamous Microtest/xStore machine still doesn't work right - never did get any of the code from them - and the school netadmin isn't going to have a clue how to work the samba-sharing-loop-mounts linux server after my contract runs out.
Serial console... make sure you have Serial Console support in the kernel, add "console=ttySx" to the LILO append= line, and maybe fix the/dev/console device node. The Text-Terminal HOWTO has the details.
That's strange, why would 98Lite be so popular if it killed Windows? Windows 98 actually works pretty well stripped of IE, and even Windows2000 will work fine without it, thanks to IERadicator and careful manual removal of a few files it doesn't touch in this version. Currently posting this from an IE-free Windows 2000 machine and a recent Mozilla nightly build.
Haven't tried killing IE6 in WinXP yet - I don't expect that to go very well.
If a new machine with WinXP pre-installed has a network card built in, the default setting is to auto-discover an IP through DHCP. So it should be plug-and-play, barring any strange RR login programs (not sure if they still use those in some areas). Besides, XP's network subsystem (apart from the firewall software I haven't checked out yet) is virtually identical to Win2k - XP is really just NT5.1 anyway.
Right when I read the article about IBM 75GXP hard drives crashing, my nice new 60GXP 60gb drive(supposedly the newer model - faster and without the problems) decided to start creating bad sectors right in the middle of whatever NTFS5 calls its FAT. Win2k decided it didn't see the partition anymore, and kept asking "Drive D is unformatted. Would you like to format it now?" Scary part is, I had my big Comp-Sci project on there, and a DDS-2 drive was in its box waiting for me to install it.
So I brought the drive into work and ran Ontrack EasyRecovery Pro on it overnight. Somehow it was able to analyze, recover and copy every file on the drive, even those which were written on top of supposedly bad sectors. Unfortunately, EasyRecovery Pro isn't cheap ($500), but it works great.
I still can't get that DDS-2 drive (an ARCHIVE Python something-or-other) to work though, Win2k sees the drive but won't recognize the new tapes I'm feeding it.
Now I'll agree that the Model M's are great; I have my own stockpile of them (both the full-size and SpaceSaver). But you can find those everywhere, and I know of a keyboard that's even better.
Model M's are pretty close, but not quite reach the perfect feel of the keyboard that came with the original IBM XT. The XT model, however, won't plug into modern AT/PS2 keyboard ports, due to an incompatibility in the controller chips (?).
I thought all was lost until I found a huge monster of a keyboard - apparently off of an original IBM AT, this thing weighs even more than the XT keyboard and has that perfect mechanical feel to it. A couple keys are in strange places; only 10 F-keys in two columns down the left side, the Capslock is stuffed directly under right Shift key, and the inverted-T arrow keys are missing. But once you get used to it, it's a great keyboard. =]
Don't expect to find them easily though... This one I recovered from a back-room cabinet in the local high school where I work, sitting on top of a stack of about 25 eight-inch floppy disks from an IBM Displaywriter (no I'm NOT making this up).
Don't laugh, but the only really stable Windows machine I have is a K6-2 300 with a PC-Chips M571 (or something like that) running Win2k. Of course that machine just gets used for Web browsing and email...
All my other machines are tortured and usually crash every few days, probably because they're overloaded with strange hardware with bad drivers - the Miro DC20 video-capture card, an ISA dual-serial-port card designed for a Tandy 1000, the Seagate MFM hard drive and controller, and the Matrox videocard designed for a Mac, to name a few...
I'm not so sure about the other sites, but Slashdot has both an RDF and an XML format file with current headlines, and it's documented on the Code page, second section down.
I was just about to say something about that book; great reading if anybody hasn't yet.
Of course, if I remember right (big IF there), the really scary part of their teleportation method was that even though they perfected the laser disintegration, fractal-compression and transmission processes, they had absolutely no idea how to reassemble the matter once the datastream reached its destination reality. Again they relied on the infinite-universes theory and knew that in one random quantum universe, their counterparts DID know how to reconstruct the matter and the source matter from THAT reality would get reconstructed instead - but not be different enough to change anything.
All of which has absolutely no relevance to the actual topic but I thought it was really cool. =]
Hrm, interesting; I had not thought about that when I read it the first time. When I send in a request for the code (sans serial number, now), I'll ask them about it.
Well, I think I can get the school to pay for it; in any case, putting it on SourceForge won't be a problem. =] If anyone wants the address once I get it up, post your (spamproofed, whatever) email here somewhere (or email slashdot@brtb.org) and I'll send a link to everybody. It'll be interesting to see what exactly they send me on the CD (what code is there, what condition it's in, etc)...
Well, I will freely admit that there is some (probably) non-GPL software in there - the CD manager, web interface, maybe even that flash filesystem driver, and they're free to distribute it however they feel like it. But the point is, I didn't have to touch any of that to determine that the base of the entire system, and a great portion of the functionality, is Linux and GPL code.
Well, if I managed to imply something along those lines, I didn't mean to; their Windows interface, web scripts and cd-manager software are probably all their own coding, and they can license it however they want. In the above post I simply stated that I didn't have to reverse-engineer any of their proprietary code to figure out there's GPL software in the box.
Now I've been known to be wrong, but here's the way I see it: I knew it was based on GPL software just from looking at the syslogs in the interface - the boot sequence from Linux kernel and various lines from "smbd", "nmbd" and "nwserv" were pretty hard to miss. As far as I can see, the software they wrote themselves was the Web interface itself, a filesystem driver and some CD-image-management programs; the only "reverse-engineering" I had to do was to the GPLed software itself.
BTW, just so nobody goes off on a security tangent about a hidden root password, I tested the one I found on the second Zerver and it doesn't work, so apparently they made it different for each machine (GOOD IDEA).
Sounds about right... I just didn't make the sequence clear enough in the comment (actually looking at it I totally screwed it up, oops). At the time I contacted the FSF I didn't know libc5 was in there; after I got the hidden root password yesterday I was able to telnet in, and find all of the programs in there and their version numbers.
Well, I didn't know it had glibc1 in there at the time I contacted the FSF; I finally got non-web access to the machine yesterday, the FSF email was last week. I do have an email in to them about the libc part, which hopefully they'll do something about.
Sorry I left that part out... I'm just more concerned about the code for kernel and Samba because the machine's pretty much useless to me without it.
Speaking of GPL violations, I found a pretty flagrant one at work a few weeks ago...
Microtest (now XStore) put together a mess of GPL software - a modified Linux kernel 2.0.27, Samba 1.9.x, Apache, the MARS_NWE netware emulator, and GNU C libraries (libc5), among others, stuffed them on a flash chip in a drive-bay-size embedded 486-based computer, and sells it as their "DiscZerver" product line. Nothing wrong with the method, but there's plenty wrong in their implementation.
The web interface, the only given method of configuring the device, refers to the various services installed generically, like "Web server," "SMB server," "NCP server," etc. - there's no mention anywhere, even in the manual, of the actual programs being used. Of course along with this is no accompanying source code or even the offer to provide any, as the GPL requires.
I can't even get any tech support from this company, much less someone to ask about getting the source code for the software and whatever modifications they made, which include a flash-filesystem driver ("yaffs") for the kernel. I did manage to hack out the root password (which they apparently hide from all customers); with that I found a shell prompt (Stand-alone Shell v1.0 - GPL? dunno) which only increased my determination as I could see exactly what programs they managed to steal, strip out identifying info, and use without credit.
I did contact the FSF, and they did confirm the existence of a GPL violation, but were unable to do anything specific as they do not hold copyright on any of these programs (and actually suggested I post to Slashdot to get some answers =] ) Of course xStore itself has not returned my emails or phone call.
So right now I have a nice little piece of hardware, a bunch of GPL software that Microtest 'stole' (for lack of a better word) and no idea what to do next. I'd be happy if I could just get the code so I can fix NMBd to work properly. I've thought about trying to make my own really-small distro to load on, but it's not really worth my time - I could just load the CD images into my other Linux server, connect the CD tower, and get on with life... but I really shouldn't have to do either. Any ideas?
Yeah, I had one of those (Legend 402CD) running as my linuxbox-firewall for the longest time... when I failed putting an old CGA monitor on it (no jumper to disable the onboard video, grr) I gave up, ripped off the keyboard, and just console=ttyS0'ed it.
Kinda funny though, and I have no idea how it did this, but apparently the 540mb Conner drive I had in there quit but I didn't know about it for about three weeks...
It's not just little router-boxes. I had to setup a Windows 2000 Adv-Server machine a week ago to do some port routing and it's got this exact same behavior; forwarded ports get routed to the right machine fine on the outside connection but fail from inside.
Course I might have set it up wrong, but I couldn't find the option to fix it anywhere! =]
Slashdot Mirror
was that WordStar possibly? Ah for the good old days... fit the OS (DOS 4.01), word processor and spreadsheet (Lotus 1-2-3 of course) all stored on the 5.25" full-height 10MB hard drive with plenty of room to spare for the text games =]
Well the older Maxtors have occasionally given me trouble, but the newer ones are fine - maybe because of the infusion of the tech they bought from Quantum. Heck, I just bought a 60gb Maxtor D-740x and the thing's got a Quantum-style case and everything, just with the Maxtor logo on it instead =]
Of course you may not think Slack's a major distro, but there are those who would beg to differ ;)
It's not exactly professional, but it keeps the drives cool. =]
Actually I could use something like this as well, since the infamous Microtest/xStore machine still doesn't work right - never did get any of the code from them - and the school netadmin isn't going to have a clue how to work the samba-sharing-loop-mounts linux server after my contract runs out.
Serial console... make sure you have Serial Console support in the kernel, add "console=ttySx" to the LILO append= line, and maybe fix the /dev/console device node. The Text-Terminal HOWTO has the details.
Haven't tried killing IE6 in WinXP yet - I don't expect that to go very well.
If a new machine with WinXP pre-installed has a network card built in, the default setting is to auto-discover an IP through DHCP. So it should be plug-and-play, barring any strange RR login programs (not sure if they still use those in some areas). Besides, XP's network subsystem (apart from the firewall software I haven't checked out yet) is virtually identical to Win2k - XP is really just NT5.1 anyway.
Edlin? Try "copy con: autoexec.bat"... just hope you never have to go back a line, and remember to hit F6 (or Ctrl-Z) to put in your own EoF!
So I brought the drive into work and ran Ontrack EasyRecovery Pro on it overnight. Somehow it was able to analyze, recover and copy every file on the drive, even those which were written on top of supposedly bad sectors. Unfortunately, EasyRecovery Pro isn't cheap ($500), but it works great.
I still can't get that DDS-2 drive (an ARCHIVE Python something-or-other) to work though, Win2k sees the drive but won't recognize the new tapes I'm feeding it.
Model M's are pretty close, but not quite reach the perfect feel of the keyboard that came with the original IBM XT. The XT model, however, won't plug into modern AT/PS2 keyboard ports, due to an incompatibility in the controller chips (?).
I thought all was lost until I found a huge monster of a keyboard - apparently off of an original IBM AT, this thing weighs even more than the XT keyboard and has that perfect mechanical feel to it. A couple keys are in strange places; only 10 F-keys in two columns down the left side, the Capslock is stuffed directly under right Shift key, and the inverted-T arrow keys are missing. But once you get used to it, it's a great keyboard. =]
Don't expect to find them easily though... This one I recovered from a back-room cabinet in the local high school where I work, sitting on top of a stack of about 25 eight-inch floppy disks from an IBM Displaywriter (no I'm NOT making this up).
All my other machines are tortured and usually crash every few days, probably because they're overloaded with strange hardware with bad drivers - the Miro DC20 video-capture card, an ISA dual-serial-port card designed for a Tandy 1000, the Seagate MFM hard drive and controller, and the Matrox videocard designed for a Mac, to name a few...
I'm not so sure about the other sites, but Slashdot has both an RDF and an XML format file with current headlines, and it's documented on the Code page, second section down.
Of course, if I remember right (big IF there), the really scary part of their teleportation method was that even though they perfected the laser disintegration, fractal-compression and transmission processes, they had absolutely no idea how to reassemble the matter once the datastream reached its destination reality. Again they relied on the infinite-universes theory and knew that in one random quantum universe, their counterparts DID know how to reconstruct the matter and the source matter from THAT reality would get reconstructed instead - but not be different enough to change anything.
All of which has absolutely no relevance to the actual topic but I thought it was really cool. =]
Hrm, interesting; I had not thought about that when I read it the first time. When I send in a request for the code (sans serial number, now), I'll ask them about it.
Well, I think I can get the school to pay for it; in any case, putting it on SourceForge won't be a problem. =] If anyone wants the address once I get it up, post your (spamproofed, whatever) email here somewhere (or email slashdot@brtb.org) and I'll send a link to everybody. It'll be interesting to see what exactly they send me on the CD (what code is there, what condition it's in, etc)...
Well, I will freely admit that there is some (probably) non-GPL software in there - the CD manager, web interface, maybe even that flash filesystem driver, and they're free to distribute it however they feel like it. But the point is, I didn't have to touch any of that to determine that the base of the entire system, and a great portion of the functionality, is Linux and GPL code.
Well, if I managed to imply something along those lines, I didn't mean to; their Windows interface, web scripts and cd-manager software are probably all their own coding, and they can license it however they want. In the above post I simply stated that I didn't have to reverse-engineer any of their proprietary code to figure out there's GPL software in the box.
BTW, just so nobody goes off on a security tangent about a hidden root password, I tested the one I found on the second Zerver and it doesn't work, so apparently they made it different for each machine (GOOD IDEA).
Sorry I left that part out... I'm just more concerned about the code for kernel and Samba because the machine's pretty much useless to me without it.
Microtest (now XStore) put together a mess of GPL software - a modified Linux kernel 2.0.27, Samba 1.9.x, Apache, the MARS_NWE netware emulator, and GNU C libraries (libc5), among others, stuffed them on a flash chip in a drive-bay-size embedded 486-based computer, and sells it as their "DiscZerver" product line. Nothing wrong with the method, but there's plenty wrong in their implementation.
The web interface, the only given method of configuring the device, refers to the various services installed generically, like "Web server," "SMB server," "NCP server," etc. - there's no mention anywhere, even in the manual, of the actual programs being used. Of course along with this is no accompanying source code or even the offer to provide any, as the GPL requires.
I can't even get any tech support from this company, much less someone to ask about getting the source code for the software and whatever modifications they made, which include a flash-filesystem driver ("yaffs") for the kernel. I did manage to hack out the root password (which they apparently hide from all customers); with that I found a shell prompt (Stand-alone Shell v1.0 - GPL? dunno) which only increased my determination as I could see exactly what programs they managed to steal, strip out identifying info, and use without credit.
I did contact the FSF, and they did confirm the existence of a GPL violation, but were unable to do anything specific as they do not hold copyright on any of these programs (and actually suggested I post to Slashdot to get some answers =] ) Of course xStore itself has not returned my emails or phone call.
So right now I have a nice little piece of hardware, a bunch of GPL software that Microtest 'stole' (for lack of a better word) and no idea what to do next. I'd be happy if I could just get the code so I can fix NMBd to work properly. I've thought about trying to make my own really-small distro to load on, but it's not really worth my time - I could just load the CD images into my other Linux server, connect the CD tower, and get on with life... but I really shouldn't have to do either. Any ideas?
Kinda funny though, and I have no idea how it did this, but apparently the 540mb Conner drive I had in there quit but I didn't know about it for about three weeks...
-- brtb
Course I might have set it up wrong, but I couldn't find the option to fix it anywhere! =]
-- brtb
Nah... Junkyard Wars! Now THERE's a sport!
</joke>