ncommander

The 2024 Goal List

Well at the time I’m writing this, I’m about 75% done with the primarily production of a video on SunOS and NIS. I’ve been chipping away at it all last week, but its slow going. In parallel, I’ve been listening to audiobooks, and been working on finalizing my realistic goals for 2024.

2024-03-03 11:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post

Properly Ancient DNS

Like, half of these were already obsolete before I was born ...

The reason I looked at named on SunOS was to see how hard it would to get a DNS resolver that SunOS's DNS stub will accept. It seems to want to do a reverse lookup of the nameserver, and its getting Operation Not Supported from basically all of them.

(for context: this resolver was written in an era befoer IPv4 exh...

N's Life: Unfamiliar Cities

Let me give you a scene:

I am walking alone down a main thoroughfare in an unfamiliar city.

I have my phone on me, but it's off. I roughly know where I'm going, but there's a difference on looking at it on a map, and actually going there.  Ask me how I know this.

After all, when ...

People Send Me The Best Lost Media

Advanced NetWare/86 from 1985. The dump had some problems, but BCD and I have been working on it in the background. Not sure if its actually usable yet, but here's some previews. I've got a wiki page started, and we've had some initial investigations from Discord.

So far:

 - The flux dump was a 360k disk in 1.2 MiB drive. its 'usable', but there are bad sectors

 - T...

Tech Notes: SunOS, Darwin, and NIS

Well, I think the SunOS explorations I was doing last week finally got me over the point of doing a video on NIS. I'v...

N's Life: A New Chapter

It’s weird being on the road again. It’s even weirder not having a set destination for once. This entire period reminds me of those years on the road at Canonical. As I write this, I am uploading the first draft of what I call “Five OSes RapidFire”, although it will no doubt have a more catchy title by time it goes up.

My entire life has been reduced to a backpack.

In some w...

What Comes Next

So, I actually got a video out the door. That’s been a weight off my shoulders, and I have been experimenting with ideas. One of the things I’ve been doing in my downtime has been watching Computer Chronicles on the Internet Archive, with the possibility of maybe doing a retrospective on the show. It’s been fascinating watching footage of a world that no longer exists, and what TV was lik...

Sun's Network Information Services, in action

An emulated SPARCStation 5 booting off the network due to no HDD, finding a RARP server, downloading a copy of the SunOS kernel, and booting into a full diskless environment feauting NIS and NFS.

TIL there are versions of Netscape that don't support DNS

So, I've been exploring a weird disc of software for SunOS. I wasn't certain I was going to make a video about this, more seeing if the mood felt right, but then I ran into this ...

This CD has had some interesting surprises, and I haven't even gotten to the main event yet

Installing Five Very Rare Operating Systems Rapidfire (ft. Cray mainframes)

Got to be honest, I forgot how much work there was to do after you're 'done' with the project, but here it is. Getting this out the door was easier said than done, and I left in a few flaws that I'd normally correct, but  as far as YouTube is concerned, I simply need to get the thumbnail, and click Go.

Patreon has had a large revamp, and I'm largely getting used to the workflow agai...

tl;dr - I'm rendering out the first draft of the next video

As I write this, the fans on my MacBook Pro are grinding away - it's the first time I think I've ever heard them run in over a year of having this laptop. They're rendering out what I've been what on and off in the last two weeks since my last post. It's a "Top 5" format of installing operating systems that you've probably never heard of.

The name, the video format, and the title are goi...

Why I dropped off the face of the planet, and a status update ...

So, uh, I’m going to put it upright here. Everything I’ve worked on for the channel is going into storage due to a drastic upheaval in my life. While I can continue to stream and make content from my laptop, at least for now, I’m expecting not to truly be able to do so until my real life situation is a lot more stable.

Before I go into how I am personally doing, let me get to the pa...

On FreeDOS and Windows ...

So, the other night, I did five hours of experimenting if you could install Windows 9x from FreeDOS, and the answer is, yes you can, but it also uncovered another issue that I think is bigger, and I’d like to get some thoughts from folks. Before getting into this, I would like to thank you for all your support, and especially those who contributed to the tip jar, because it seriously makes a ...

ARTICLE: A Weekend Learning COBOL

So, after spending the weekend poking COBOL with a stick, I decided to write down my thoughts. In the very early days of this channel, my videos were connected with text write-ups, and I decided that I would like to revive this some of my projects by expanding to Medium.

If I can join the Medium partner program, which requires 100 followers, it would be a step towards helping keep the ch...

So an update on what I've been up to

So, uh, yeah, it got quiet here. In this case, it’s part of my pre-YouTube content creation career catching up with me. For those who don’t know, long before I did YouTube, I helped create a fork of the 90s tech website Slashdot, known as SoylentNews (https://soylentnews.org), something I helped found in 2014.

My YouTube...

Scripting Progress

So I've finally started recovering from VCF and planning out what I suspect will be a multipart video. I'm still trying to figure out what the actual shape of this things will be, primarily because there's a lot of things I can say about Windows NT, and only so much room in the margins in which to talk about it.

My general guess is this is going to be similar to the DOOM on AIX production...

Scripting Tidbits

So I'm right now currently recovering from everything that was the last week of my life. Between both VCF and general life stuff, I'm finally having a chance to unwind, and with the weekend here, I thought I would share some bits from my notepad.

---
However, there was a second possibility. What if there was a native version of Windows for the PowerMac?

Sounds silly, but in ...

The Unseen World of PowerPC - VCF Presentation

So, I'm writing this on Monday around noon, and lets just say travelling with a bunch of vintage computing kinda sucks. It was a blast seeing what everyone met, and the number of people who recognized me or knew of my videos.

At this point, I'm going to take the next day or two off (plus I need to reassemble the Tower of Power), and then start production on the next video. I've already g...

VCF East, Production Schedule, and Spring Plans

Hey all, so I'm writing this less than 24 hours before VCF East. For those who follow the backend stuff, you'll know that my life has been going through a fair bit of upheaval since last December, and I'm still not sure where the dust is going to settle.  So, let me lay down some points.

First off is VCF. VCF is a big event for me, since its where I tend to find most of the interest...

An Image of the first SDL application running on Windows NT for PowerPC

I apologize for the lack of streams. I've had some rather annoying life issues get in the way, which when combined with the fact that I woke up to a popped breaker and my fridge lukewarm should give you an idea how its going ...

I am recording what I'm doing, and will release a video hopefully not too long after VCF. Time permitting, I am still hopeful I will have a livestream of installi...

Hello World on Windows NT/powerpc (and other notes)

So I've been experimenting with this on and off all week. I found that despite the success on the stream, its not stable if networking is enabled. I *suspect* this is a problem with the AMD PCNET driver just not working on PowerPC properly. This machine wasn't officially supported, and I suspect the PCNET driver was never tested on real hardware.

Fortunately, there are a couple of other E...

AIX Password Reset on the PowerStack

Well I've been doing some work for VCF. Decided to retest if I could boot into rescue mode off the CD now that the timekeeper has been replaced, and it turns out, yes I can. This makes it way easier to dump the files. Also, check in that last login date!

Next livestream will be doing stuff on Windows NT for PowerPC.

VCF and The Unseen World of PowerPC

So, if you hang around in Discord, you might know that I was accepted for VCF East this year. While I've been there prior, where I had my Compaq Portable 1 on display, this year I'm going to be a bit more ambitious. I'm going to bring quite a few systems that have been on the channel, specifically:

- IBM RS/6000 Model 150 running AIX
- IBM RS/6000 Model 140 running Windows NT for Power...

Reworking the streaming setup a bit ...

And yes, that's a model M on a Raspberry Pi!

That said, I finally have an easy way to write disks and do other backend stuff. Biggest win here is I now have the filming desk operating as an entirely independent network segment!

I still need to do some additional work since my internal LAN is a bit of a mess but this will do for now!

So I got a Motorola PowerStack as a donation ...

Windows NT/ppc was a childhood dream. I bought two IBM RS/6000s in an attempt to run it, and as we saw the other night, and as we saw, I eventually succeeded. This?

I don't even know what to say. This is like wishing for a very rare car for sentimental reasons, and getting the deluxe coop model of it. There's only one or two PReP PowerPC boxes (namely the ones that can run OS/2 for Power...

The "Exploring Presentation Manager" Write-Up Is Now Available

I'm assuming most people already know this, but there was a delay before I got the VoD out, but for those who can't spend the time to watch extremely long streams, well, I've got you covered.

So I got electrocuted in my apartment this Wednesday ...

There's basically no other way to sum this one up. I was working on rewiring my apartment, and for those who watch my livestreams, you know the wiring here is kinda shit. I plugged in an extension cord to an outlet in my kitchen to bypass a dead outlet in my living room. The extension cord was unplugged on the other end, and I got shocked through the insulation.

Turns out the outlets in m...

As promised, here's my reworked desk/office area

Biggest changes at the moment is that my desktop computer is off the ground, which makes it much easier to modify and rework the streaming machine for different camera setups and archival projects.

I've also replaced my home router with a TP-Link VPN Router for doing link aggregation, both to take advantage of my downlink, and to get more bandwidth between my desktop, and NAS. I need to s...

This is a Weitek P9100 graphics card

So in theory the only reason my RS/6000 Model 140 won't run Windows NT for PowerPC is due to the IBM GXT card is not supported. Using off the shelf cards or random eBay finds can always be a bit dodgy, but this appears to be a card out of a IBM workstation so we'll see ...

Inside the IBM PS/2 Model 30 286 ...

It was a bit dusty ...