A3000UX up and running AMIX again!

[Failure]

Well, I am the guy who wound up with the A3000UX that was up for grabs here not too long ago.  I received it from an aquaintance in the Chicago area only today, and I didn't waste any time getting it back up and running :-)

It is running Amiga Unix 1.1 right now.  I did not know the root password, which presented a problem: I do not have my other 3000 yet, so I can't make the AMIX install disks...I tried mounting the filesystem on a Solaris box at work, but didn't have any luck.  So I brought the machine home, recompiled the Linux kernel on a spare box with UFS/SysV FS support and various partitions support...no luck there, either.  So I just dd'd the whole drive into a file, and ran "strings amix.img | grep root > rootgrep" on it.  Then I searched through the file with vi until I found this little gem:

root:vbe9NP8WVbix6:9937::::::

Muahaha.  Ran john-the-ripper on it:
failure@shodan:~/john-1.6/run$ ./john passwd
Loaded 1 password (Standard DES [48/64 4K])
guesses: 0  time: 0:00:00:05 (3)  c/s: 20667  trying: barrin - meo1
guesses: 0  time: 0:00:00:16 (3)  c/s: 18386  trying: pumel - coodog
guesses: 0  time: 0:00:00:47 (3)  c/s: 58066  trying: pactie! - ar24958
wasp             (root)
guesses: 1  time: 0:00:01:23 (3)  c/s: 81622  trying: wikl - wnc7

Yay!  So I put the drive back into the system, booted it up, and here is the first login on this system in a long time:

http://failsure.net/~failure/img/dscf0156.jpg

Check out that uptime!  ;-)  Amiga: stable like a rock!  And for kicks, here is a pic of the current setup:

http://failsure.net/~failure/img/dscf0157.jpg

Off to play some more now.  Can't wait for the A2065 to show up so I can get this thing on the internet.

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Failure

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Yeah, the battery is actually missing.  Jamie conscientiously removed the leaky battery, so when the system is powered on it thinks it's the tail end of 1977.  I can't decide right now whether to replace the battery or just hook the system to the UPS and leave it on all the time.

Jamie thinks the system may have come from a power company Commonwealth Edison.  Wherever it came from, it was obviously put to work.  The hosts file lists things like "Joliet Data Center Vax" and "IBM Mainframe".  There are no less than 13 systems identified as Amigas with IP addresses in the host file.  The last time the system was used was January 3, 1998, and it was shut down at precisely 2:00 PM, likely until Jamie got it and powered it up.

I started X and put an xterm and stuff up, but lacking a mouse at the moment couldn't do anything else.  The display is black and white.

The machine has both cc and gcc compilers, and some Amiga specific binaries I didn't get a chance to play with in /usr/amiga/bin.  gcc is 1.37.  One of the two users had an AmigaOS startup file in his home directory, the other user only had a core dump.

*edit* the system had a NIC in it when it was at work, the system still looks for it at boot time and complains since it isn't there...

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Failure

[Failure]

Matt_H wrote:
I think Commodore used to sell 3000UX packages with a 2065 and 2410 graphics board. I see you've already got a 2065 on the way, but if you could get a 2410, you'd probably have a killer AMIX rig. I've never seen one for sale, though. Ever. :-(

Yes.  I don't expect of find one of those, although I am looking for one.  Probably what I will do is just redirect the Amiga's display to another X server on the network, so that I am not stuck with 1-bit(!) color.  But I can't do that until I get the ethernet card :-/

I'm getting more software on the machine despite the lack of networking using Kermit (I wonder how many remember that) through the serial port at a stately 500 CPS, approx.  So far I have compiled gzip, and am currently transferring the screen utility to the Amiga.  I think screen will make working on a slower machine like that much more pleasant!  Thankfully it already had tar, since the sources were 4 meg and would have taken a couple hours to transfer.

I was able to make Amix 2.03 install floppies yesterday too, thanks to Kermit.  These were able to boot my other 3000 with 3.1 ROMs, but it didn't see the 2MB memory card plugged into one of the Zorro slots, only the memory on the motherboard.

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Matt_H wrote:
What version ROMs are in your 3000UX? I've got a standard 3000 with 1.4 ROMs, but there's no option anywhere on the bootmenu for UNIX, even ghosted out. I'd love to get AMIX onto this machine to test it out.

You'll have to forgive my ignorance of pre-3.1 ROMs here, I can describe what I have but I don't know if it's different than what is standard.  Basically, the boot menu has kickstart options to load 1.3 and 2.0 from HD or floppy.  If I select 2.0 HD, it loads the kickstart from HD, reboots the system and begins loading AmigaOS 2.x (this doesn't complete, as it tries to finish booting from the network...?).  If I do not interact with the boot menu, it loads UNIX.  If I do not interact with the boot menu, but I put a bootable WB 2.0 floppy in the drive, it begins to boot AmigaOS but fails (I forget the error).  If I do the 2.0 HD option from the boot menu, with the floppy inserted, it boots WB 2.0 from the floppy.

Sorry my description must sound like I'm calling AOL tech support, but I have never used any but 3.1 ROMs!

Regarding the AMIX tapes, I've read the descriptions of all the problems people were having there as well.  But it seems that the people who were trying to make tapes were doing so from another UNIX?  The install script is very simple, so if the cpio files are on the tape in any order it seems like it should work, the problem may be that the Amiga simply can't read the tape written on another system.  It's a stretch but once I get ethernet on the thing, I will try copying the files over and making an install tape from AMIX.  If that works I'd be happy to provide copies.

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Well I figure, it's already available on the internet for some years... :-)

Maybe "they" don't mind because nobody seems to be able to install it!

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Just for kicks (haha, get it?  we were talking about kickstart!  haha...ha...*cough*) I tried putting the AMIX HD into my 3000 with 3.1 ROMs.  It failed to boot, but it did try to boot _something_.  I got one of those pretty flashing red boxes as a result.

I'm a little sad that it didn't Just Work, but the fact that it boots ok from the AMIX 2.03 install floppies seems to indicate it's not an insurmountable problem.  The version on the HD is 1.1, which is the first release AFAIK, and very buggy if Usenet is to be believed.

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Hey, thanks for that info!  I had the understanding that only the Ariadne driver was available.  I wonder where I can find those CDs, though :-/

I was able to repair a broken, spare Amiga mouse (2-button only) and actually use X.  Despite being 1-bit color, it's actually not that bad.  Predictably, the X server is much, much faster than when I tried it in Linux on another 3000 some years ago now.  I ran good ol' xeyes, xcalc, and a GUI file browsing utility.

[Failure]

I was finally about to get the machine online yesterday, with the receipt of an A2065.  It was easy to get the NIC to work...it "just worked".  It was harder to get it to actually get outside the local network.  For example, to get DNS lookups to work at all, I had to change a link from libsocket.so from libsockhost.so to libsockdns.so...which I only found after trawling in Usenet archives for about twenty minutes.  Also for some reason, it's not setting the default route so I stuck a little hack startup script (S99hack ;-p) to do it at the end of the boot process.  But it works now.  And, yes, I put it on the internet:

http://bfe.homelinux.net/

Note that is on a flaky ADSL line and dynamic IP, so it's not unusual for it to be down periodically.  I chose NCSA as the webserver since I figured it would be likely to compile without trouble.  I was mostly right.

Now that it's on the network, it will be much easier to get new software on it, and to try to make the install tape mentioned earlier.  Good ol' rcp.