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jmcunx OCC 3

Old Computer Challenge # 3 Notes

For OCC 3, I resurrected an old tower that has just a wired connection, specs from neofetch.

Links to Solene's Challenge Pages:

OCC 3 (gemini)

OCC 3 (gopher)

OCC 3 (https)

System Information, some from neofetch:

OS: NetBSD 9.3 i386 -- Packages: 189 (pkg_info)
CPU: AMD 586-class (1), 333MHz -- Memory: 203MiB / 511MiB
root: /dev/wd0a - Size 11G - Used 2.5G Avail: 8.3G
home: /dev/wd0e - Size 7G - Used 4.2G Avail: 2.4G

Picture of the System, normally it would be on the floor:

jmcnet1 pic (gemini)

Workaround for Download Failures

Summary:

PROS:

I really like the Large Text Screen, no glasses.
tmux, irssi, mutt and lynx works great and meets most of my needs.
console cut/paste via a mouse works great.
Since no GUI type applications, I notice hardly any speed difference.

CONS:

No wireless.
I really miss reading my daily comics.
I am unable to update my WEB Page for this challenge, that will need to wait.
I miss the convenience of X, but a minor thing. But I could not view prints people posted in #oldcomputerchallenge on librachat :)
Anxiously waiting for a hardware crash. I doubt that will happen, but this PC is over 25 years old and already has some eccentrics. Hoping the eccentrics are due to the upgrade hack from 7.0.2 to 9.3.

Some Day Soon:

Get the CDROM working, praying it is not a motherboard issue, then do a full install of NetBSD 9.3 to correct issues with pkgsrc (day 1 below).
A lot of people in this challenge was using Gemini, I will need to investigate that and maybe migrate to it.

Day 7: Sunday, July 16, 2023

All went fine, another slow day with a bit of lynx, nethack, email, IRC, USENET. But I did manage to find an old DVD Drive for this system, it came from an old PC a relative was discarding. I hope when I replace that munged CDRROM Drive, I will be able to boot and do a full install NetBSD 9.3, replacing the 9.3/7.02 mix I have right now on this system :)

Day 6: Saturday, July 15, 2023

Some odd network issues, outside of that, very quiet and slow.

Day 5: Friday, July 14, 2023

Not much happened today. Spent the day away from computers :)

Day 4: Thursday, July 13, 2023

Fixed the issue with that program (day 3 below), it was a memory overflow in a totally different area of the program. Using '-O1' highlighted it. Odd that program had no issues on OpenBSD and Linux but failed as it should have on NetBSD.
Rest of the day, lynx, nethack, email, IRC, USENET and nothing.

Day 3: Wednesday, July 12, 2023

I fixed some issues with programs I have and using git and 'git push' worked fine.
But discovered weirdness with my setup, one of my programs that calls localtime will crash if compiled with -O1, works with -O0. Other programs calling localtime with -O1 works. I guess something I did :) It works on Linux and OpenBSD with -O1, but core dumps on this system using NetBSD. Something to look at tomorrow.

Day 2: Tuesday, July 11, 2023

Today was just spent hacking my backup script to copy changed files to a set of diskettes as encrypted files. That was successful. I had to ensure space would not be exceeded when copying to a 1.44mb Diskette. This required the use of 2 Diskettes.
But, I had to "cheat", I needed to upload my ssh public key for this PC to github, since X fails to run due to a framebuffer issue, I had to use my main Laptop to do that :( This was needed to upload a config script I had to change for use with this PC. I did not want to loose any git changes should the hardware fail.
Now I believe I can do everything I need to do.

Day 1: Monday, July 10, 2023

For the last few days have been spent trying to upgrade NetBSD from 7.0.2 to 9.3. The issue is the CDROM is munged. It opens and closes by itself every so often. That means it is impossible to boot a CD.
I had repurposed this PC over 10 years ago for a backup system using NetBSD when v6.0 was released. That release added Y2038 fixes for i386 systems. IIRC it was the first "free" system to add that fix.
After many tries playing with the bios and reboots, hoping to get lucky, I settled on using sysupgrade(8) via Upgrading NetBSD. I used the major release upgrade method. To my surprised, that worked fine. But it broke pkgsrc. To fix pkgsrc I removed directories "/var/db/pkg" and "/usr/pkg", then installed the packages. That seemed to work OK, but I do have a odd minor issues with a couple of installed packages. Nothing to prevent me from using this system.
Rest of Day One was spent using rsync to update $HOME from my main laptop.

Epilogue

I was able to replace the CDRROM Drive with one scavenged from a Junk PC a relative gave me. The relative was a heavy smoker at the time, thus all the internals of that PC are covered with tar goo. But the CDROM drive was isolated and was fine. This solved all the flakiness I had with the old CDROM.
This means I was able to do a full install of NetBSD 9.3. The install corrected all the issues I had during OCC 3 due to the mix of 7.03 and 9.3 items :)
Obviously I investigated Gemini, that is a very cool protocol. I will probably move my site to gemini.

back

back to OCC

back to my capsule

$Id: occ_3.gmi,v 2.5 2023/10/17 14:24:40 jmccue Exp $