TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

49 participants
6506 discussions

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Alec Muffett > until someone realised that you could do: > ln -s /bin/scriptname ./-i > "-i" # assuming that "." is already in your path > ...and get a root shell. I'm clearly not very awake this morning, because I don't understand how this works. Can you break it down a little? Thanks! Noel

5 years, 9 months

Set-uid shell scripts

by Dave Horsfall

Is it just me, or did someone actually implement set-uid scripts? I've proposed some silly things over the decades (my favourite is stty() working on things other than terminals, and guess what, we got ioctl() etc) but I have a vague recollection of this... The trouble is, I've worked with dozens of Unix-based vendors over the years (some good, some not so much) and so I've lost track of all the stupidity that I've seen. ObAnecdote: Just about every Unix vendor went belly-up shortly after I left them (under various circumstances), because the waste-of-space middle managers simply did not appreciate the importance of having a Unix guru on board if you're in the game of selling Unix boxen. I'd happily name them, but I think the principals are still alive :-) -- Dave

5 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] Who's behind the UNIX filesystem permission

by Doug McIlroy

Read and write permission were common ideas--even part of the Atlas paging hardware that was described before 1960. The original concept of time-sharing was to give a virtual computer to each user. When it became clear that sharing was an equally important aspect, owner/other permissions arose. I believe that was the case with Multics. Owner/other permissions were in PDP-11 Unix from the start. Group permissions arose from the ferment of daily talk in the Unix lab. How might the usual protections be extended to collaborative projects? Ken and Dennis deserve credit for the final implementation. Yet clean as the idea of groups was, it has been used only sporadically (in my experience). Execute permission (much overloaded in Unix) also dates back to the dawn of paging. One Unix innovation, due to Dennis, was the suid bit--the only patented feature in the Research system. It was instantly adopted for maintaining the Moo (a game now sold under the name "Master Mind") league standings table. One trouble with full-blown ACLs as required by NSA's Orange Book, is obscurity. It is hard (possibly NP- complete) to analyze the actual security of an ACL configuration. A common failing of Unix administration was a proliferation of suid-root programs, e.g. mail(1). I recall one system that had a hundred such programs. Sudo provided a way station between suid and ACLs. Doug

5 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] Who's behind the UNIX filesystem permission

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Arthur Krewat > there's the setuid bit on directories - otherwise known as the sticky > bit. Minor nit; in V6 at least (not sure about later), the 'sticky' bit was a separate bit from SUID and SGID. (When set on a pure/split object file, it told the OS to retain the text image on the swap device even when no active process was using it. Hence the name...) Noel

5 years, 9 months

Video of PDP-7 with Graphics-2?

by Warren Toomey

Hi all, I'm chasing the Youtube video of the PDP-7 at Bell Labs where people are using it to draw circuit schematics. This seems to show the Graphics-2 module that, I believe, was built at the Labs. Can someone e-mail the URL? I've done some grepping but I haven't found it yet. Thanks, Warren

5 years, 9 months

Re: [TUHS] Additional groups and additional directory permissions

by Norman Wilson

Thomas Paulsen: isn't Kirk McKusic a member of our group? ==== Kirk is a member of many groups, all at the same time. Norman Wilson Toronto ON

5 years, 9 months

Who's behind the UNIX filesystem permission implementation

by Stephan Han.

Hello Unix enthusiasts. I'd like to know who or the group of people behind implementing this filesystem permission system. Since we are using this system for nearly 40 years and it addresses all the aspects of the permission matter without any hustle. I'm inspired to know who/how came up with this theory? Also if it derived from somewhere else or If there's an origin story about this, it would be worth to share. Cheers. Stephan -- No When

5 years, 9 months

DMERT

by Kevin Bowling

I was talking about DMERT today and Larry McVoy was wondering if it slipped out in any fashion. I believe there were official trainers as well as a production emulator that ran it on Solaris/SPARC. I have never seen them anywhere. Old phone phreaks I’m acquainted with had illicit access. Does anyone know if source or the trainer or emulator are tangible? I enjoyed the BTSJ on DMERT as much as the Unix articles. Highly recommend reading. Regards, Kevin

5 years, 10 months

just over 32 years ago

by Charles H Sauer

https://technologists.com/photos/1987/fullsize/1987ThompsonRitchie.jpg (thanks to Mike Tilson) -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/Skype/Twitter: CharlesHSauer

5 years, 10 months

PCC for the i386

by Jason Stevens

Does anyone know where the 386 port from PCC came from? While trying to build a Tahoe userland for the i386, it seems that everything was built with GCC… Was there a PCC for the i386 around ’88-90? It seems after the rapid demise of the Tahoe/Harris HCX-9 that the non Vax/HCX-9 platforms had moved to GCC? Also anyone know any good test software for LIBC? I’ve been tracing through some strange issues rebuilding LIBC from Tahoe, where I had to include some bits from Reno to get diropen to actually work. I would imagine there ought to have been some platform exercise code to make sure things were actually working instead of say building as much as you can, and playing rogue for a few hours to make sure its stable enough.

5 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] BSD/386 (was: Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386)

by Richard Tobin

> BSD[Ii] got in trouble with AT&T for their sales number, which was > 1-800-ITS-UNIX. I don't know if they ever got officially sued or not. There was a joke that MIT should have sued them too, for violating their trademark on ITS. -- Richard -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

5 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

by Rudi Blom

>Does anyone have documentation or history for European efforts in the Unix-like operating systems? For example there was Bull’s Chorus which I seem to recall was based on Mach or a competing microkernel (it was a very long time ago and I used it for no mare than about two hours..). >I am rather saddened by the fact that there is so much about all the Unix (and not only >Unix) history of computing in the USA and so very little in Europe. I wouldn’t even know >where to start, to be honest, all I have as a history is the Italian side from my father and his other mad friends and colleagues in Milan. So little of it is recorded, never mind written down. In the 80-tisch I worked at Philips Data Systems in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. Not in Development, but in System Support. Philips was working on a System V.3 based UNIX running on Motorola 68000 CPUs in a P9X00 server. Called MPX as in Multi-Processor UNIX. The Multi part refers to having an Ethernet, X25 and SDLC board running a tailored version of the OS to offload the main CPU. See for example https://www.cbronline.com/news/better_late_philips_enters_the_uk_unix_marke… https://www.cbronline.com/news/philips_ready_with_68030_models_for_its_p900… Later Philips moved to i386 with a 'unknown version' based UNIX. Division was bought by DEC (some say sold off by Philips) in 1991 and we moved to DEC's choice of SCO UNIX. The 'intelligent comm boards were ported and still running the separate OS though. Unfortunately I never had any of that OS type of source and my paper archive was left behind. Only have some small higher level test stuff and my mail archive. For a while I was "rudi blom" <blom(a)kiwi.idca.tds.philips.nl>, later rudi blom"@apd.mts

5 years, 10 months

European unix-like OS

by Steve Simon

Nearly all the unixes i used where from the US, but one stands out. I spent a week or two trying to get my head around Helios which was aimed at parallel systems (transputer). I believe it was French in origin, and wad unix-like at the command line but the shell supported mesh pipelines and other unique ideas. interesting but hard to manage.. -Steve

5 years, 10 months

Mach'86

by Jason Stevens

For anyone that is interested, there is 2 files on Kirk’s DVD that don’t appear on the CD’s mach.86-accent mach.86 The smaller mach.86-accent is a few months newer than the other, and is strictly the kernel. mach.86 contains stuff like the libraries for mach, bindings for pascal, along with an updated libc, and various binaries to run under 4.3BSD. It appears that the Mach project at that time was pretty much in step with the CSRG release. Speaking of pascal, the early version of MIG is actually written in pascal. There is quite a #ifdef ACCENT stuff in the code As well. So the bindings are more than something superficial. I had a major issue trying to use RA81 disks on SIMH, although switching to RP06’s seemed to have made things a little more stable, the larger issue seems to have been the async I/O code, and disabling that increased stability and reduced disk corruption greatly. Setting up the build involved copying files from the ‘cs’ directory to their respective homes, along with the ‘mach/bin/m*’ commands to the /bin directory. Configuring the kernel is very much like a standard BSD kernel config, however the directory needs to exist beforehand, and instead of the in path config command run the config command in the local directory. I have been able to self host a kernel, and build a good portion of world before I realized that the I/O was probably what I was Fighting and went back and restored the 4.3 tape back onto the HP’s and just re-built the kernel to verify it works. For those Wanting the command for SIMH it’s simply ‘set noasync’. The XU adapter worked out of the box with a simple: set xu ena att xu nat:tcp=42323:10.0.2.15:23 Which allowed me to telnet into the VAX, making things much easier than dealing with the console. While this kernel does have mentions of multi processor support I haven’t quite figured out what models (if any) are supported On the VAX, and if SIMH emulates them. While http://www.oboguev.net/vax_mp/ has a very interesting looking multiprocessor VAX Emulation it’s a fictional model based on the microvax, which I’m pretty sure 4.3BSD/Mach’86 is far too old for. And for those who like the gratuitious dmesg, this is a self hosted Mach build loading hp(0,0)boot Boot : hp(0,0)vmunix 393480+61408+138472 start 0x1fa5 Vax boot: memory from 0x92000 to 0x800000 Kernel virtual space from 0x80000000 to 0x82000000. Mach/4.3/2/1 #1: compiled in /usr/mk/MACH on wb2.cs.cmu.edu at Mon Oct 20 12:54:42 1986 physical memory = 8.00 megabytes. available memory = 5.86 megabytes. using 408 buffers containing 0.79 megabytes of memory VAX 11/780, serial#1234(0), hardware ECO level=7(0) mcr0 at tr1 mcr1 at tr2 uba0 at tr3 zs0 at uba0 csr 172520 vec 224, ipl 15 ts0 at zs0 slave 0 dz0 at uba0 csr 160100 vec 300, ipl 15 de0 at uba0 csr 174510 vec 120, ipl 15 de0: hardware address 08:00:2b:0d:d1:48 mba0 at tr8 hp0 at mba0 drive 0 hp1 at mba0 drive 1 hp2 at mba0 drive 2 hp3 at mba0 drive 7 Changing root device to hp0a I uploaded my SIMH config, along with the RP06 disk images here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/bsd42/files/4BSD%20under%20Windows/v0.4/Ma…

5 years, 10 months

Happy birthday, 386BSD!

by Dave Horsfall

386BSD was released on this day in 1992, when William and Lynne Jolitz started the Open Source movement; well, that's what my notes say, and corrections are welcome (I know that Gilmore likes to take credit for just about everything). -- Dave

5 years, 10 months

Unix 50th celebration

by Deborah Scherrer

Many, many thanks to Clem Cole for arranging the 50th Unix Anniversary celebration in Seattle last Wednesday. It was wonderful to see old friends again. Most of these folks are still out in the world sharing their brilliance in various computing facilities. Lots of very special people still doing wonderful work! Thanks, Clem, for the chance to meet up with them again! Deborah

5 years, 10 months

Another pioneer gone

by John P. Linderman

Fernando Corbato died last Friday. http://news.mit.edu/2019/mit-professor-emeritus-fernando-corby-corbato-comp…

5 years, 10 months

VMS / Unix and old CSRG paper

by Paul Ruizendaal

As the last week had a discussion on this list about various VMS+Unix projects from that era, maybe it is a good time to ask the below question again: For a while I have been searching for a 1982 tech report from CSRG: "TR/4 (Proposals for the Enhancement of Unix on the Vax)" This report later evolved into TR/5, the 4.2BSD manual, but I’m specifically looking for TR/4. The only reference that I have for TR/4 is contained in a 1982 discussion about VMS vs. Unix: https://tech-insider.org/vms/research/1982/0111.html (seek for message 5854 from Bill Mitchell). Clutching at straws here, but maybe a copy survived in a box with VMS+Unix materials. Wbr, Paul

5 years, 10 months

Turing to be on 50-pound note

by John P. Linderman

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/business/alan-turing-50-pound-note.html?…

5 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] Thanks for Virtuallyfun! (was Re: Happy birthday, 386BSD!)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Adam Thornton > something designed for single-threaded composible text-filtering > operations is now running almost all of the world's multithreaded > user-facing graphical applications, but that's the vagaries of history > for you. It's a perfect example of my aphorism, "The hallmark of truly great architecture is not how well it does the things it was designed to do, but how well it does things it was never expected to handle." Noel

5 years, 10 months

Floppy to modern files for Usenet maps

by Mary Ann Horton Gmail

Hunting around through my ancient stuff today, I ran across a 5.25" floppy drive labeled as having old Usenet maps. These may have historical interest. First off, I don't recognize the handwriting on the disk. It's not mine. Does anyone recognize it? (pic attached) I dug out my AT&T 6300 (XT clone) from the garage and booted it up. The floppy reads just fine. It has files with .MAP extension, which are ASCII Usenet maps from 1980 to 1984, and some .BBM files which are ASCII Usenet backbone maps up to 1987. There is also a file whose extension is .GRF from 1983 which claims to be a graphical Usenet map. Does anyone have any idea what GRF is or what this map might be? I recall Brian Reid having a plotter-based Usenet geographic map in 84 or 85. I'd like to copy these files off for posterity. They read on DOS just fine. Is there a current best practice for copying off files? I would have guessed I'd need a to use the serial port, but my old PC has DOS 2.11 (not much serial copying software on it) and I don't have anything live with a serial port anymore. And it might not help with the GRF file. I took some photos of the screen with the earliest maps (the ones that fit on one screen.) So it's an option to type things in, at least for the early ASCII ones. Thanks, Mary Ann

5 years, 10 months

Looking for email archives...

by Warner Losh

... of the pdp7 unix restoration activities. I could find the old unix72 ones at tuhs, but not the unix v0 archives. Can someone point me in the right direction? A google search or 4 has turned up nothing. Has it been archived somewhere? Warner

5 years, 10 months

CSRG Archive! (and Mach fun)

by Jason Stevens

Well I checked out Kirk’s site, and found out that he has a DVD to go along with the old 4 disc CD-ROM sets: In the 20 years since the release of the CSRG CD-ROM Set (1998-2018) I have continued collecting old software which I have put together in two historic collections. The first is various historic UNIX distributions not from Berkeley. The second is programs and other operating systems that shipped on or influenced BSD. The distribution is contained on a single DVD that contains all the original content from the original 4-CD-ROM distribution, these two collections of historic software, and a copy of John Baldwin's conversion of the SCCS database contained on the original disk4 to a Subversion repository. Unlike most write-once technology which remains readable for less than ten years, this DVD is written using M-Disc technology which should last for centuries. The price for the DVD is $149.00. I know the $150 USD may sound pricy but the historic2 archive does contain a couple additional copies of Mach! And a bunch of other stuff in there as well, it’s gigabytes of stuff to go through.

5 years, 10 months

RIP Fernando Corbató

by Dan Cross

Tom Van Vleck just passed this on the Multics mailing list. Fernando Corbató has passed away at 93. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/science/fernando-corbato-dead.html Clem organized the wonderful Unix 50 event at the LCM two days ago, where we saw a working 6180 front panel on display (backed by a virtual DPS-8m running Multics!). This is our heritage and our history, let us not forget where we came from. - Dan C.

5 years, 10 months

Re: [TUHS] Interactive Systems (was Pcc for 386)

by ron＠ronnatalie.com

Interactive Systems. Now there’s a name I’ve not heard in many a year. Heinz Lycklama went there. The did a couple of things, a straight UNIX port to various things (PDP-11, 386) and also there “UNIX running under VMS” product. They also had their own version of the Rand Editor called “INed” that was happiest on this hacked version of a Perkin Elmer terminal. Early versions were PWB UNIX based if I recall. My first job out of college was working with IS Unix on an 11/70 playing configuration management (essentially all the PWB stuff). I also hacked the line printer spooler and the .mm macro package to do classification markings (this was a part of a government contract). A few years later I was given the job of porting Interactive Systems UNIX that was already running on an i386 (an Intel 310 system which had a Multibus I) to an Intel Multibus II box. Intel had already ported it once, but nobody seemed to be able to find the source code. So with a fresh set of the source code for the old system from IS, I proceeded to reverse engineer/port the code to the Message Passing Coprocessor. (Intel was not real forthcoming for documentation for that either). Eventually, I got it to work (the Multibus II really was a pleasant bus and worked well with UNIX). I went on to write drivers for a 9-track tape drive (which sat in my living room for a long time), a Matrox multibus II framebuffer (OK, that had problems), and a SCSI host adapter that was talking to this kludge device that captured digital data from a FLIR on uMatic cassettes (but that’s a different story).

5 years, 10 months

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TUHS