TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

61 participants
6532 discussions

Last officially distributed and currently available BSD version

by Will Senn

All, I'm not 100% sure how best to ask this, but here goes... I own a copy of the CSRG Archives CD Set that Kirk McKusick maintained. I bought them ages and ages ago (BTW, they are now all available on Archive.org) I dusted them off today because I had the brilliant idea that with my significant growth in understanding related to all things unix and ancient unix, that I might find them interesting and useful. They are interesting, jury's out on useful beyond being a broweasable historical archive of individual files. One of the CD's contains a 4.4 and 4.4BSD-Lite2 folder and is labeled releases (disk 3). I opened the 4.4 folder and it appears to be a set of folders and files I would expect to find on a release tape, but unlike a tape, which one could mount and boot from, I have no idea if this would be usable as install media (if you do, please let me know how). I googled about the two releases and although the same text appears all over the place about how Berkeley released one version, then removed some components, then re-released, and eventually wound up at 4.4BSD-Lite2, I could not figure out whether the word release meant sourcecode, installable media, or what. I gather a lot of this made sense back in the early 1990's but it's all a bit muddy to me in 2017. In trying to figure it all out, I came across a webpage talking about 2.11BSD (maintained into this decade) and another about 4.3BSD Quasijarus (also maintained in this decade?). Both descriptions contained the text, "It is the release of 4.4BSD-Lite, and requires the original UNIX license" (see http://damnsmallbsd.org/pub/BSD-UNIX) My sense of things after reading and browsing and such is that with regards to 4.4, 4.4BSD-Lite, and 4.4BSD-Lite2, they are either not released (4.4), encumbered and retracted (4.4BSD-Lite), or not installable (4.4BSD-Lite2)... Dang, so confusing... My interest is pretty much based on a strong desire to boot up a 4.4 system that as closely as possible maps to the one described in "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System" that I can experiment with as I'm going through the text. I think I understand the version history as it is described in various places, but I just can't figure how the last handful of versions relate to real media that is available to enthusiasts. Questions begging answers: What is the last bootable and installable media, officially distributed by Berkeley? Is that image currently publicly accessible? What is the closest version, that is currently available, that would match the os described in "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System"? Many thanks, Will -- GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462 7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] Trouble wih TUHS rsync

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

Dave Horsfall reported failures for the TUHS mirror at his site. I've just looked at our TUHS mirror in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, and found that % rsync rsync://rsync.math.utah.edu produces the expected list. I also checked the mirror cron job logs, and found that they all look similar for every day this year, with no indication of connection errors. I then checked the TUHS filesystem tree, and found only two files created in the last month (timestamps in UTC): -rw-rw-r-- 1 mirror mirror 99565 Oct 20 17:27 UA_Documentation/TUHS/Mail_list/2017-October.txt.gz -rw-rw-r-- 1 mirror mirror 400419 Sep 30 17:27 UA_Documentation/TUHS/Mail_list/2017-September.txt.gz The first of those arrived here late last night (Oct 20 23:15 MDT, Oct 21 05:15 UTC). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] basic tools / Universal Unix

by Doug McIlroy

> sed *n l pathname > > The latter also has the advantage that its output is > unambiguous, whereas the output of historical cat *etv is not. > > But mind you, in preparation of this email i found a bug in > Busybox sed(1) which simply echoes nothing for the above. I assume that * is a typo for - . If so, sed did just what -n tells it to--no printing except as called for by p or P. And speaking of sed anticipating other tools, the inclusion of "head" in v7 as a complement to "tail" was a close call because head is subsumed by sed q. Doug

7 years, 8 months

TUHS list: back to one list

by Warren Toomey

All, behind the scenes we have had Grant Taylor and Tom Ivar Helbekkmo helping us find a solution to the TUHS list DKIM issues. We have been running two separate lists (unmangled and mangled TUHS headers) for a few weeks. It looks like we can now merge them all back together and use the settings on one to avoid (most of) the DKIM problems. So that's what I've done: merged back to a single TUHS mailing list. I've restored the [TUHS] on the Subject line as well. I'll monitor the logs for further bounces. Fingers crossed there won't be any further unsubscriptions from the list due to bounce processing. If there are, I'll manually put you back in. Cheers all & thanks to Grant and Tom. Warren

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS] /bin/true (was basic tools / Universal Unix)

by Dan Cross

[I tried to send this earlier, but was thwarted by list shenanigans. Apologies if it's a dup.] On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 10:52 AM, Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote: > My favorite reduction to absurdity was /bin/true. Someone decided we > needed shell commands for true and false. Easy enough to add a script that > said "exit 0" or exit 1" as its only line. > Then someone realized that the "exit 0" in /bin true was superfluous, the > default return was 0. /bin/true turned into an empty, yet executable, file. > > Then the lawyers got involved. We got a version of a packaged UNIX (I > think it was Interactive Systems). Every shell script got twelve lines of > copyright/license boilerplate. Including /bin true. > The file had nothing but useless comment in it. Gerard Holzmann has something on this that I think is great: http://spinroot.com/gerard/pdf/Code_Inflation.pdf - Dan C. PS: A couple of thoughts. The shell script hack on 7th Edition doesn't work if one tries to 'execl("/bin/true", "true", NULL);'. This is because the behavior of re-interpreting an execution failure as a request to run a script is done by the shell, not exec in the kernel. This implies that one could not directly exec a shell script, but rather must exec the shell and give the path to the script as the first argument. I vaguely recall we had a discussion about the origin of the '#!' syntax and how this was addressed about a year or so ago. I tried to write a teeny-tiny '/bin/true' on my Mac. Dynamically linked, the obvious "int main() { return 0; }" is still a little over 4KB. Most of that is zeros; padding for section alignment and the like. I managed to create a 'statically' linked `true` binary by writing the program in assembler: % cat true.s # /bin/true in x86_64 assembler for Mac OS X .text .globl start start: mov $0x2000001, %rax # BSD system call #1 mov $0, %rdi # Exit status: 0 = 'true' syscall # OS X requires a non-empty data segment. .data zero: .word 0 As I recall, % macOS requires you to have a data section aligned to 4K, even if you don't use it. The resulting binary is a little over 8K; again, mostly zeros. There are parlor tricks people play to get binary sizes down to incredibly small values, but I found the results interesting. Building the obvious C program on a PDP-11 running 7th Edition yields a 136 byte executable, stripped. Still infinitely greater than /bin/true in the limit, but still svelte by modern standards.

7 years, 8 months

Re: [TUHS} Running V8 ...

by Doug McIlroy

> How realistic would the experience be to actually running the system > described in the Unix Programming Environment [v8] if it's actually running > BSD 4.1... Thanks for any insights y'all might have on this. This question bears on a recent thread about favorite flavors of Unix. My favorite flavor is Universal Unix, namely the stuff that just works everywhere. That's essentially what K&P is about. That's also what allowed me to use a giant Cray with no instruction whatsoever. And to do everyday "programmering" on the previously inscrutable Macintosh, thanks to OS X. The advent of non-typewriter input put a damper on Universal Unix. One has to learn something to get started with a novel device. I am impressed, though, by the breadth of Universal Unix that survives behind those disparate facades.

7 years, 8 months

ARPANET Information Brochure (December 1985)

by Michael-John Turner

Hi, It's not 100% on topic, but I thought this December 1985 ARPANET Information Brochure would be of interest to the list: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a164353.pdf Cheers, MJ -- Michael-John Turner * mj(a)mjturner.net * http://mjturner.net/

7 years, 8 months

Re: ARPANET Information Brochure (December 1985)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry McVoy >>> I was told, by someone that I don't remember, that uwisc was the 11th >>> node on the net. ... If anyone can confirm or deny that I'd love to know. > I dunno. I don't have any axe to grind here. I don't care if they were the first, or the last. You asked "If anyone can confirm or deny that I'd love to know", and all I'm trying to do is _accurately_ answer that. > That 1985 map has uwisc in there I have a large collection of ARPANET maps here: http://www.chiappa.net/~jnc/tech/arpanet.html and the first one on which UWisc shows up is the October, 1981 geographical map - over ten years since the ARPANet went up (December, 1969 is the earliest map I have there). > I do know that prior to the net there was uucp Which "net" are we talking about here? ARPANET? CSNET? Internet? The UUCP network long post-dated the ARPANET - I think it was started in the late 70's, no? The earliest Internet map I have is from 1982, here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Internet_map_in_Februar… and again UWisc is not on it. (Yes, I know it's on Wikipedia, but I'm the one who uploaded it, so I can verify it.) CSNET I don't know much about, that may have been what the comment referred to. Wikipedia (for what little we can trust it) says "By 1981, three sites were connected: University of Delaware, Princeton University, and Purdue University"; since Lawrence Landweber at UWis was the main driver of CSNET, I doubt it would have been far behind. Noel

7 years, 8 months

Re: ARPANET Information Brochure (December 1985)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Grant Taylor > Does anyone know of a good place to discuss networking history, routing, > email, dns, etc. I'd like to avoid getting too far off topic for TUHS. You could try the "Internet History mailing list": http://www.postel.org/internet-history/ which covers all of networking, including pre-Internet stuff. Noel

7 years, 8 months

Re: ARPANET Information Brochure (December 1985)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Larry McVoy > I was told, by someone that I don't remember, that uwisc was the 11th > node on the net. ... If anyone can confirm or deny that I'd love to know. There's a copy of the July '77 revision of the HOSTS.TXT file as an appendix here: http://www.walden-family.com/dave/archive/bbn-tip-man.txt The IMPs are numbered in order of deployment; so UCLA is #1, SRI is #2, Utah is #4, BBN is #5, etc. I don't see Wisconsin in the list at all. Maybe the person meant CSNET? Noel

7 years, 8 months

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