@yakkoj@fosstodon.org
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

yakkoj

@yakkoj@fosstodon.org

🇺🇸 🇲🇽 🇩🇪 🇹🇷 🇧🇪 🇳🇱

what does it look like to work in dysfunctional IT? How about retrocomputing or video games?

also offering up some hot takes on programming despite discovering decades ago that being a programmer is best left to others.

liberal user of CWs; trying to atone for over a decade of Twitter ruin.

The country flags above show which countries in the world I've been to.

NO LONGER yakkoj on Twitter.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

izaya, to random
@izaya@social.shadowkat.net avatar

hey friendos, if I need to change the pinout of an IDC connector on a cable, do I just need to uhhh

  • pop the strain relief off
  • pop the actual top off
  • pull out the ribbon cable
  • separate the cables and re-order them as necessary
  • put them back into the clip
  • squish top down
  • attach strain relief clip
yakkoj,
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

@izaya that's about how it goes

You may end up lifting some of the pins out because the cable has a tenacious grip on them, but they can be put back

If you have a vise handy, you can squeeze the connector back in that way. Otherwise some pliers and a rag (so the pliers don't mess the connector up) should work

yakkoj, to random
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

"If I have a problem copying a socket, just drop a REGULAR FILE in the destination! He'll love that when trying to start X!"

ha ha very funny SunOS cpio...

(that was the only issue I've encountered so far. My new disk BOOTS!)

yakkoj,
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

Solution: just remove the duff files and rerun openwin. DONE

yakkoj, to random
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

NeWS was way ahead of its time. Imagine if either NeWS had come out around 2000 or that hardware in 1989 was as powerful as 2000 hardware.

I'm frankly surprised the TNT demo ran on my IPX. This thing shoves about 10 windows onscreen and they're rendered in Display Postscript. It wasn't dog-slow and I could still do things on my system after it was up!

yakkoj, to random
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

TIL SunOS has a "snap" program!

No, not the thing that litters your mount table with loop devices that Canonical shipped

It's a SunView application that does roughly what modern useradd(8) would do

Since SunView was being deprecated at the time, there's also an Openlook application called "logintool" to replace it.

yakkoj, to random
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

>see /usr/share/lib/terminfo scroll by in cpio.

So SunOS 4 DOES have terminfo! (SunOS 4.1.4, anyway)

screen configure script probably wasn't finding the header files for terminfo, then :oP

It might be worth recompiling to get better terminal support. It needs all the help it can get.

yakkoj, to random
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

the kid's got this part of life worked out; the parent is almost required by law to not let them know they're right ;o)

https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/112549281805108163

yakkoj, to random
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

Bumped up against a 32-bit limit for SunOS filesystem

time to cut the filesystem in half, then

grumble grumble Ronald McDonald

yakkoj,
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

yep, that was the problem. All filesystems can now be made with "newfs" (the "friendly" front end to mkfs, according to the man page ;o)

yakkoj, to random
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

>Golf game screenshots in Home
>"Links 386!"

And reading the post, it's Links 386 Pro. I have a copy on floppy somewhere!

yakkoj, to random
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

It's 2024 and I get whacked by the "default ASCII transfer mode" dumb default in ftp again

yakkoj, to random
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

I win

I've got partitions that use all the (valid) blocks I defined in the label, and "newfs -N" suggests it'll create the filesystems of the exact size I specified on the partition map!

Now if I can get the boot blocks out of the old disk, I should just be able to restore the cpio archives I made to the new one, and avoid reinstalling.

yakkoj,
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

I'll need to run "/usr/kvm/mdec/installboot" to tell the boot loader about the block location of "boot" in the new root directory after I restore the cpio archives

And I HAVE to run this every time "boot" may have been touched, or no boot

Yep, welcome to the mid 1990s that used 1980s expectations for booting!

yakkoj,
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

Oops, I ballsed that up. I needed to add teh size of a partition in CHS (what's in parens on the right) to get the cyl start of the next partition.

I was wondering why my filesystems were getting corrupted. It's because the partitions overlapped.

"dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd1b" followed by an fsck of /dev/rsd1g (where it correctly claimed no superblock) verified my mistake ;o)

yakkoj,
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

I got clued into this when I unmounted the new /home and then remounted it, but "home" showed up as a FILE of impossible size

yakkoj, to random
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

Seagate documentation on the ST34572 is lacking in the one place it needs to NOT be lacking (or, more likely, they're making a point that SCSI isn't bound by CHS like SunOS and other "every OS sucks" thing wants it to be)

It only gives the max number of sectors. In HEX!

Before, I spotted "6300" as the number of cyls and "8" as the number of heads, and came up with 178 as the number of sectors.

Trying to make SunOS format it that way resulted in label failure. :o(

yakkoj,
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

Once I spotted the max LBA of 8888923, I came up with a "CHS" value of 6242/8/178 (which is 8888608; good enough for the chars I go out with).

Oh also SunOS format doesn't believe that a hard drive can spin at 7200. The ST34572N is Barracuda; it does TOO go 7200rpm, but that's a SunOS format problem. ;o)

Overall point is that if I can get SunOS to label this disk, I can use it!

yakkoj,
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

@sirber see that's the thing: back when SCSI was new, one of its supposed party tricks was "you don't need to know CHS anymore; the target will just be queried for it and it'll be computed!"

Obviously reality begged to differ ;o)

stfn, to random
@stfn@fosstodon.org avatar

So I'm reading the The European Electricity Review, and its full of good news, with some precautions.

The most important part is:

Record falls in EU coal and gas electricity generation push power sector emissions down 19% in 2023!

yakkoj,
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

@stfn Every time I see miles-long trains of coal rolling through here, it makes me grumpy.

Practically ANYTHING is better than burning coal today. Even if that train isn't for a coal-fired plant around here, it's still being burnt and doesn't need to be.

yakkoj, to random
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

Ahahahaha I've got a static-linked stty for SunOS now! (I discovered a github repo that had the source for it ;o)

yakkoj,
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

Strange... I was looking for CHS values for some bigger hard drives I have, and that came up in a search.

I think I can make a proper disk label for the ST34572N I have, but the reason I avoided it first time round was that the farther you go back with BSD, the more demanding its disk label is of having weird stuff in it. Also not terribly familiar with the limits on disk size or geom limits (if there are any, and there most likely are)

brooke, to random
@brooke@bikeshed.vibber.net avatar

major league baseball has been promoted to colonel league baseball

yakkoj,
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

@brooke in teh same promotion group along with Captain Data Breach being promoted to Major Data Breach!

yakkoj, to random
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

Surprised Oracle let SunOS-era documentation live.

Maybe the Sun documentation team operated covertly. It certainly isn't something Oracle did on purpose...

yakkoj, to random
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Wow, this Openwin 3 install ships with xlock! I haven't used that in many years!

yakkoj, to random
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"Mom, I wrecked the server by trying to run X!"

(Never encountered this before... not "Watchdog reset" or the refusal to sync. Whatever I did whacked SunOS good!)

now I have to sit through fsck of BSD 4.2 filesystems which can take awhile

yakkoj,
@yakkoj@fosstodon.org avatar

>looking at /usr/openwin/bin/openwin suggests all this happened because DISPLAY wasn't set.
>ps output of a properly running session agrees

Surprise, surprise. How soon I forget that house of cards when dealing with X! ;o)

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