[Simh] Networking help with 4.3 BSD Quasijarus running on SimH microvax

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2017-11-05 02:12, Will Senn wrote:
> On 11/4/17 7:50 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>> (I honestly fail to understand why anyone would ever want to deal with 
>> Quasijaurus... And I haven't seen anything from Solokov in about 15 
>> years or so now, is he still working on it?)
>>
>> Anyway, how backward can Quasijaurus become? If ping don't have a -n 
>> option, there must surely be some other switch which does the 
>> equivalent of just printing ip addresses without doing any translation?
>>
>>   Johnny
>>
> Johnny,
> 
> As is my usual motive for dabbling in unfamiliar waters, I'm reading a 
> book, "Advanced Unix Programming" by Marc J. Rochkind, written in 1985. 
> It is written from a System V/System III/Xenix 3 and to a lesser extent 
> BSD 4.2/Version 7 perspective and I was looking around for one of these 
> environments to get a dev environment working that would map to what I 
> was reading that wasn't Version 7 and that would work well in a 
> simulator. In the process of looking, I found Quasijaurus and it seemed 
> it might serve this and other purposes. I also found a version of PC/IX 
> that runs ok in CGA mode on my mac that might work. I think it's 
> basically a System V variant. Do you think there's a better match?

It always depends on what you want.
Not sure if you could find SysV somewhere, or BSD4.2. But that would 
obviously be your choice if you are reading a book based on those 
systems, and you want to recreate that environment.

Anything before BSD 4.3 Reno will seem somewhat archaic, as a lot of 
change started happening with that version.

Quasijaurus was created by Michael Solokov since he felt that anything 
beyond BSD 4.3 Tahoe was bloated, and had all the Posix stuff which was 
just evil (which Henry mentioned). And while I could agree with Solokov 
on some of the bloat comments, his insistence on keeping all development 
beyond 4.3 Taho out also made Quasijaurus an ugly beast, since (in my 
view) some thinga that came in Reno is actually nice.
But Solokovs uncompromising opinions made Quasijaurus, in my view, a 
system that just is horrible. I had lots of clashes with him back in the 
day on the topic, but then he disappeared, and I don't know what he's up 
to nowadays.
Not sure if Quasijaurus even added support for any hardware beyond what 
was already supported in BSD 4.3, but that might have been one of the 
things Solokov did expand on.

Harry mentioned that he'd set it up and managed to communicate with 
local machines, which suggest that networking as such works, and then 
it's only a question of setting the routing table, and making sure 
whatever router you use don't block you.

Since I don't know exactly what you want to accomplish, I don't know 
what to suggest. Early NetBSD (as Harry mentioned) is one possibility. 
Support for VAX has been there more or less since 0.9 (but back in that 
day is was 11/750 only, and I'm not even sure how much got into the 
actual repository before 1.0). You could, of course run 4.3 Reno. I ran 
that for a number of years on a real 8650. If you switched to a PDP-11, 
you can run 2.11BSD. Which works just fine, but once again, you need to 
know a thing or two on how to set up things to get it all playing.

   Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol