Alex Hornby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Does anyone have a pure 4.3BSD system connected up to the net?
I do, of course, and not just one machine but a full machine room of them.
Absolutely pure in every way: I have my own classful net (class C, but still a
real full C, not a /24 chunk of someone's A/B or worse), not subnetted but
instead the net number assigned to the Ethernet coax, all machines connected to
this coax and addressed out of its net number, the gateway between this net and
the outside world is itself a VAX running 4.3BSD, and the outside connection is
a hard point-to-point pipe, connected to the VAX via a DSV11 (the VAX is of
Q-bus type) with a 4.3BSD driver written by me in my current capacity as the
4.3BSD maintainer. This machine I'm sending this E-mail from, ivan.Harhan.ORG,
is one of these VAXen running 4.3BSD (see the headers for the Sendmail
version). These VAXen running 4.3BSD are my *only* systems, which I use for
*everything*. But then what else would you expect from someone who is the
maintainer of an OS?
> If so
> why not give the doubters a guest account so that they can see for
> themselves.
That can be easily arranged. Anyone here is welcome to an account on
ivan.Harhan.ORG. E-mail me directly if you want one. However, I do have to
disappoint you that ivan.Harhan.ORG is a general timesharing host with normal
4.3BSD users and doesn't have anywhere near the CPU, memory, and disk resources
to compile GNU software. You can use this machine to look at 4.3BSD and play
with it, but compiling big things is not permitted. For working on GNU software
I have other machines that are dedicated to that and don't have normal users
who would be knocked off by gcc eating all CPU cycles. Unfortunately, at the
present those machines are at another facility where they won't let the general
public in. I hope to change this in the future.
For those more serious about Berkeley UNIX, I can also give a limited number of
accounts on another machine that is the main BSD development mill, with the
master source tree (SCCS) so that you can see the complete history of every
file in the tree and get any revision, etc. This of course requires a UNIX
source license, but these days it's much easier to get than it used to be. For
the past two years UNIX source licenses suitable for Berkeley UNIX have been
sold by SCO for $100, and just recently they dropped the cost to zero, with a
clickwrap license.
> Perhaps an ls -l and uname -a of such a machine would be equally
> satisfactory?
Hehehe, pure UNIX doesn't have uname! The way to identify a pure UNIX system is
to do a strings on the system image (which is of course called /unix or
/vmunix) and grep for UNIX. On ivan.Harhan.ORG this will give you:
$ strings /vmunix | fgrep UNIX
4.3 BSD Quasijarus UNIX #0: Sun Mar 26 11:09:55 CST 2000
Quasijarus is the name of the consortium that currently maintains 4.3BSD and
makes it run on a wide range of VAX CPUs (like mine). If someone had a 780 or
some other early VAX supported by the original 1986 4.3BSD tape, it would say
simply "4.3 BSD UNIX". There are no other differences, Quasijarus Project is
strictly faithful to the original 4.3BSD and doesn't make any changes other
than VAX hardware support and similar things that Berkeley CSRG itself would
feel free about in incremental 4.3BSD updates.
The date is when the kernel is built. The # number is incremented every time
you rebuild the kernel in the same directory. ivan's kernel was built in a
separate directory, which is why it's #0.
As for ls, what exactly did you want to look at? But whatever it is, you can
see it on ivan.Harhan.ORG via anonymous FTP, as I don't chroot.
--
Michael Sokolov Harhan Engineering Laboratory
Public Service Agent International Free Computing Task Force
International Engineering and Science Task Force
615 N GOOD LATIMER EXPY STE #4
DALLAS TX 75204-5852 USA
Phone: +1-214-824-7693 (Harhan Eng Lab office)
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (ARPA TCP/SMTP) (UUCP coming soon)
