[Partisan01]

Just wanted to say I got NetBSD 1.6.2 running on a Quadra 660av I have laying around. I need to order a aaui transcever to get network, but it's up and running. The speed isn't all that bad at all.

The biggest problem I had was the system was originally running 7.1, and it would not read the netbsd cd. So I had to copy 7.5 to disk in windows under Basilisk, and then do the upgrade via disk, the cdrom then worked and I was able to install.

I'm using a 250meg HD, plan on moving to 1gig soon. Feel free to leave thoughts or questions. If you have old hardware laying around give it a new lease on life and install OpenBSD or NetBSD. Net has better ethernet support for older 68k machines.

ndt

[bradoesch]

Neat. I've got a Mac IIfx that needs one of those ethernet transceivers. Where are you going to order yours from?

[Rainy Day]

Originally posted by Partisan01:
Feel free to leave thoughts or questions. If you have old hardware laying around give it a new lease on life and install OpenBSD or NetBSD. Net has better ethernet support for older 68k machines.

I've been running OpenBSD on a Quadra 605 for about a year now. The EtherNet card in my Quadra wasn't supported, so i bought an older EtherNet card (which was supported) on eBay for $8. I chose OpenBSD over NetBSD because of the emphasis on security.

One of these days i may get around to throwing NetBSD on the box just to see if my other EtherNet card is supported, and to see what other differences there might be. I use the NetBSD Booter app since it works with OpenBSD too, and has some enhancements over the version shipping with OpenBSD (e.g. support for over-clocked CPU's).

The OpenBSD install wasn't easy, though, and 68K Mac's are definitely the OpenBSD Project's orphan child. From what i hear, NetBSD has a more helpful community of users. OpenBSD folks can be rather snooty. But if security is important to you, it may be the way to go. YMMV.

[Partisan01]

Originally posted by Rainy Day:
I've been running OpenBSD on a Quadra 605 for about a year now. The EtherNet card in my Quadra wasn't supported, so i bought an older EtherNet card (which was supported) on eBay for $8. I chose OpenBSD over NetBSD because of the emphasis on security.

One of these days i may get around to throwing NetBSD on the box just to see if my other EtherNet card is supported, and to see what other differences there might be. I use the NetBSD Booter app since it works with OpenBSD too, and has some enhancements over the version shipping with OpenBSD (e.g. support for over-clocked CPU's).

The OpenBSD install wasn't easy, though, and 68K Mac's are definitely the OpenBSD Project's orphan child. From what i hear, NetBSD has a more helpful community of users. OpenBSD folks can be rather snooty. But if security is important to you, it may be the way to go. YMMV.

It's funny I'm actually a big OpenBSD user, I'm very confortable with it, but I found the same thing. Lack of documentation, lack of an active community. I have had a pain of a time trying to get a 1gig drive to work with the mac, it just won't accept it, and resource wise, there isn't much around anymore in regards to support forums.


As for ethernet transceivers my quadra has a AAUI connector on the back, i went on ebay and ordered one for $7, works like a charm. I saw some deals on there 6 for $10. They are very cheap, and fairly common in the used/old hardware arena.

nt

[Rainy Day]

Originally posted by Partisan01:
I have had a pain of a time trying to get a 1gig drive to work with the mac, it just won't accept it, and resource wise, there isn't much around anymore in regards to support forums.

I've installed it on three 68K Mac HD's now: an 800MB, 2GB and 4GB. There is some boot limitation about the system files needing to be on the first n-GB's or n-MB's of the HD, but don't recall off hand the actual limit. I think it might be 2 GB, but don't quote me on that. If it's a lower limit, that could be the problem you ran into. Dunno. In any event, careful partitioning of the HD could be the solution to your problem. The root can easily live inside a 120 MB partition, if you add other partitions for /usr and /var. This is what i have done on all but the 800 MB drive (which has a single OpenBSD partition of 462 MB).

I've never been successful in getting MySQL onto a 68K OpenBSD box. PostgresQL is available, however.

There's a Postfix m68K package for 3.4, but it is broken. It does work if you compile it from the Ports.

[Partisan01]

Originally posted by Rainy Day:
I've installed it on three 68K Mac HD's now: an 800MB, 2GB and 8GB. There is some boot limitation about the system files needing to be on the first n-GB's or n-MB's of the HD, but don't recall off hand the actual limit. I think it might be 2 GB, but don't quote me on that. If it's a lower limit, that could be the problem you ran into. Dunno. In any event, careful partitioning of the HD could be the solution to your problem. The root can easily live inside a 120 MB partition, if you add other partitions for /usr and /var. This is what i have done on all but the 800 MB drive (which has a single OpenBSD partition of 462 MB).

I've never been successful in getting MySQL onto a 68K OpenBSD box. PostgresQL is available, however.

There's a Postfix m68K package for 3.4, but it is broken. It does work if you compile it from the Ports.

Thanks for the info. I wish I was even getting that far, what happens is the apple disk utility keeps crapping out on me. I've tried replacing the scsi cable but no avail. It works great on the 250mb hard drive, but not the two 1 gig drives I have. I'm goign to make the jump to OpenBSD once 3.5 comes out in June, till then I figure I'll get my feet wet with NetBSD. I was thinking of trying to get mysql and apache set up on there. NetBSD m68k doesn't come with apache standard so that might be a huge pain in the butt.

This is kinda OT for MacNN but do you know if OpenBSD is going to release the m68k version as an iso again? I know a few versions ago it was, but I havn't seen anything about it since. To install do you just download the files to a cd and burn. I've done it on ppc with a custom disc and i386 with a custom disk. But both of those OSes you can boot from a OpenBSD media, and m68k you can't. Thanks.

nt

[Rainy Day]

Originally posted by Partisan01:
the apple disk utility keeps crapping out on me. I've tried replacing the scsi cable but no avail. It works great on the 250mb hard drive, but not the two 1 gig drives I have.

I formatted with Apple's disk utility program, but later did some repartitioning with FWB Toolkit (because it's more flexible), then reactivated the Apple drivers (probably didn't have to, but i did anyhow). Then i used the Mkfs utility to convert the partitions to BSD partitions. I did find some problems with the Mkfs utility not appearing to work well for me, perhaps because of the large number of partitions i was using? So i made a habit of running newfs whenever possible if df -h reported numbers which didn't look right, or if there was a lost&found directory on the partition (the two situations usually go hand-in-hand), followed by a fsck -f for good measure.

I use the Installer utility as little as possible, only for the bsd.tgz, base.tgz and etc.tgz files. After that, any other installs i do using tar from inside OpenBSD.

I have separate partitions for /usr and /var. If Mkfs and Installer work properly, which they did not for at least one of my HD's, then the following is unnecessary (because you can mount partitions using the mini-shell of the Installer). But because of the problem with the Mkfs utility noted above, that didn't always work for me, making it necessary to boot to BSD and wipe the partition from within BSD. My workaround was (when booted in single user mode) to wipe those partitions with newfs, then mount -o union on top of the already populated /usr and /var directories (from the initial install with the Installer utility) and re-install the base.tgz and etc.tgz files using tar. This causes the files to be written out to the separate empty partitions, but the union allows for essential programs like tar and gzip to be read from the root volume /usr directory even though they aren't (yet) on the mounted /usr partition. Then i'd umount those partitions, remove all files in the /usr and /var directories, and remount the partitions. The union feature of mount is very handy!

do you know if OpenBSD is going to release the m68k version as an iso again? I know a few versions ago it was, but I havn't seen anything about it since. To install do you just download the files to a cd and burn. I've done it on ppc with a custom disc and i386 with a custom disk. But both of those OSes you can boot from a OpenBSD media, and m68k you can't.

I think that's gone forever. I think we're lucky that they're still supporting the Mac68K at all. :/

Basically i have MacOS 8.1 on the box, and use FileSharing to move the utilities and essential .tgz files over to it. Booting off a CD might be more convenient, but this approach isn't too bad (and the HD is lots faster than the 4x CD drive i have connected to my Quadra anyhow).

[Partisan01]

Originally posted by Rainy Day:


I think that's gone forever. I think we're lucky that they're still supporting the Mac68K at all. :/

Basically i have MacOS 8.1 on the box, and use FileSharing to move the utilities and essential .tgz files over to it. Booting off a CD might be more convenient, but this approach isn't too bad (and the HD is lots faster than the 4x CD drive i have connected to my Quadra anyhow). [/B]

I'm kinda bummed that the OpenBSD support is almost non-existant. I do know that they're working on it some. I originally didn't consider it at all because it didn't support the MACE ethernet driver, then I went back to the page a few days ago and the supported hardware has been updated. I've had a pain of a time getting netbsd working on there. It works but the NetBSD version for mac68k is pretty orphaned. Maybe I'm just used to OBSD, but in Net there are all sorts of skeleton config files I've had to search on the internet for setup info. I'm not talking about obscure things, files like rc.conf. The whole ethernet setup was non-existant. A lot of etc looks like

#fill in values here for ...

I guess this is what happens when we want to use 10+ year old hardware with a modern system. I like your idea about the file sharing, I'm going to give that a whirl, it'll be much quicker. OS installs take forever on the cdrom.

Do you have any idea where I could find an old version of the FWB HD program? I think the Apple prog is dying because I used the drives in a i386 unix system a few months back. They start to initialize then give me some generic error and it stops.

Nate

[Rainy Day]

You can't totally trust their list of supported hardware. For example, they say that for a Quadra 605, which is what i'm using, ADB and Video is not supported (they say you have to connect via the serial port). But my monitor and ADB keyboard both work, and i have never used the serial port. I sent in a bug report, but last i looked, they haven't updated their doc's.

Originally posted by Partisan01:
the NetBSD version for mac68k is pretty orphaned. Maybe I'm just used to OBSD, but in Net there are all sorts of skeleton config files I've had to search on the internet for setup info. I'm not talking about obscure things, files like rc.conf. The whole ethernet setup was non-existant. A lot of etc looks like

#fill in values here for ...

Wow! OpenBSD support for Quadra's is a lot better. At least the core OS works. Mostly it's the ports which are problematic. For example i can't get MySQL to compile (but as i said, PostgresQL does compile), and i'm having a problem with Python. Sometimes if you fiddle with things enough, they'll compile though. Sometimes the packages are broken (e.g. Postfix packages; but they compile fine! The 3.4 packages were linked against the 3.3 libraries!)

Note: I'm using my 2 GB drive for compiles and it's just a little tight for that when you do a lot of compiles and don't delete the old object code (although i did previously manage to compile sendmail on my old 800 MB drive.) The ports tree is a real hog, and a simple compile seems to want to include a lot of other stuff besides what you want to compile (the dependencies go on and on and on and on...)

I guess this is what happens when we want to use 10+ year old hardware with a modern system.

Well, i'm grateful that OpenBSD supports the 68K Macs. Pretty amazing, really. But i do have to point out that UNIX is a 30 year old OS!

I like your idea about the file sharing, I'm going to give that a whirl, it'll be much quicker. OS installs take forever on the cdrom.

Yeah, the slowness of my CD-ROM drive is why i went the filesharing route to begin with. Even off the HD, the install still takes hours on my 25 Mhz CPU. I shiver when i imagine how long it would take installing off the CD!

Note: My perception is that untarring in OpenBSD seems to be about twice as fast.

Do you have any idea where I could find an old version of the FWB HD program?

There were a lot of OEM versions of it floating around, especially for external drives and also the Mac clones. I don't know if they still ship a 68K version or not, but you might check out their web site. But any other third party software might work too, such as Silverlining. However...

I think the Apple prog is dying because I used the drives in a i386 unix system a few months back. They start to initialize then give me some generic error and it stops.

Well at least the app sees the drive, which means you ought to be able to get around this problem. Have you tried putting down a new driver? If not, choose the Update Driver option, reboot, then format the drive. When you do the format, you can customize the partition map.

Another option is simply buy a new drive. I bought a 4 GB drive from this guy on eBay and it has been a wonderful little drive. And his customer support is excellent!!! Not only that, he'll partition the drive however you like. I was able to snag mine for about $20, but it took few weeks of bidding and a holiday when folks were out-of-town to get that price (i wasn't in any hurry, so i didn't mind the wait). He sells them starting at different price points, but they're all the same drive, so if you don't want to play bidding games, just select one of his "Buy it now" options for $29.95.

Note: OpenBSD does not support multiple SCSI HD's on the Mac68K, for some reason. So the only way to add capacity to your system is to buy a larger drive; you can't just add more HD's. For my purposes (i.e. running a server), the 4 GB drive has plenty of headroom.

[Rainy Day]

Update: In the last 24 hours there's been a flurry of chatter on the OpenBSD Mac68K mailing list. More, in fact, in the last 24 hours than all the traffic in the 15 or so months i've been subscribed to the list! So maybe there's hope yet!

From: Xavier Santolaria
Date: Sat Mar 27, 2004 05:53:43 US/Pacific
To: mac68k@openbsd.org
Subject: supported systems list

hi..
we are currently "cleaning"/syc'ing with reality the supported systems list
and thus we'd want to have some feedbacks from owners of supported
(or not) systems. The more detailed your feedback is, the more
helpful it will be for us.

Thanks.

Xavier.

[Partisan01]

Originally posted by Rainy Day:
Update: In the last 24 hours there's been a flurry of chatter on the OpenBSD Mac68K mailing list. More, in fact, in the last 24 hours than all the traffic in the 15 or so months i've been subscribed to the list! So maybe there's hope yet!

That's pretty cool, I just signed up for the mailing list, I'm already on the PPC one, but not the m68k. I'll have to send in my results. Thanks for the info on the drives. I probably havn't nursed them long enough. I guess since they're being detected it's possible to get it running, so that's good.

On the issue of drives what is the largest size you can toss in there? I want to run this as a server, just static pages w/ apache. I have a bunch of scsi drives, and I'm wondering if i buy the right adapters to get it to 50pin I can use them, I've got a 36gig, 17gig, two 9gigs and a few assorted others. If any of those would work I'd be delighted to get the extra space. Thanks.

nate

[Rainy Day]

When i was shopping around for drives, i found some adapters for around $12-$20, plus shipping. For my purposes, that wasn't a good investment since i could buy 50-pin drives for about that price! In fact, i bought my 2GB drive for $5, and the 4GB for $20. So while you shop for those adapters, consider the difference in price between them and a 50-pin drive. One thing about both the 2GB and 4GB drives i bought: They are very quiet. The 800MB drive i have makes a lot more noise than the other two combined! A consideration for a server box which runs 24/7.

AFAIK, there is no limit on the total size of the drive, with the caveat that there is a limit – on certain platforms – on how large the root partition may be and where it resides (i.e. at the start of the drive). I don't recall offhand what that limit is, and it varies from platform to platform, but for 68K Macs i think it might be in the neighborhood of 2GB; don't quote me on that though! But that's way larger than you need. My root partition is only 115 MB on my 2 GB "build" drive, and it's only 21% full (and that's with some extra tar files on it right now!):

Code:
df -h
Filesystem    Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/sd0a     115M  22.4M  81.9M    21%    /
/dev/sd0e     245M   164M  68.6M    71%    /usr
/dev/sd0f    1010M   749M   209M    78%    /usr/ports
/dev/sd0g    98.4M  17.5M  76.0M    19%    /var

I have a 256 MB swap partition not shown above, and a 300 MB MacOS partition. That seems a good size for the MacOS partition (which i have placed at the end of the HD) as that allows enough headroom for MacOS 8.1 and some OpenBSD install files without consuming a vast amount of the HD space.

The trick is to use larger partitions for the piggy directories (e.g. /usr and /var). As you probably already know, the advantage to partitioning up a server drive is that if someone tries to attack it, the amount of damage they can do is limited. If mail has it's own partition, an attack (or SPAM) can't fill up your drive and bring the whole machine down; it can only fill the partition and maybe bring down the mail server (but not Postfix). And since Apache is chrooted in OpenBSD, the amount of damage someone can do by attacking the web server is limited to that partition.

With that said, unless you have a lot of large graphics files or movies or other hogs you want to serve up, or a database driven site like macnn, most HTML servers have very modest storage requirements. I only have a 200MB partition for HTML – but i do have a 1 GB partition for a database, in case i want to do some database driven web pages.

One of the FAQ's on the OpenBSD web site talks about drive partitioning and has a table of recommended minimum sizes for various platforms.

And here's how i've partitioned my 4GB server drive (which, for security reasons, contains no compilers):

Code:
df -h
Filesystem    Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/sd0a     116M  16.5M  87.9M    16%    /
/dev/sd0g     343M   109M   216M    34%    /usr
/dev/sd0e    1007M  42.5M   914M     4%    /postgresql
/dev/sd0f    58.9M   1.7M  54.3M     3%    /var
/dev/sd0h     196M   5.7M   181M     3%    /var/www
/dev/sd0i    98.4M  48.0K  93.4M     0%    /var/www/logs
/dev/sd0j    1007M   126K   957M     0%    /var/mail
/dev/sd0k    98.4M   2.0K  93.4M     0%    /home
/dev/sd0l    24.4M   2.0K  23.2M     0%    /tmp

[Partisan01]

Originally posted by Rainy Day:
When i was shopping around for drives, i found some adapters for around $12-$20, plus shipping. For my purposes, that wasn't a good investment since i could buy 50-pin drives for about that price!

I have ordered from this site before surpluscomputers.com and they have adapters for around $10. My drives are SCA, so I need to step that down. That site also has screaming deals on SCSI drives. If you can put up with sound they have a 47gig full size drive for $15. They also have 9gig drives for %5.99. I'm pretty sure they're all scsi SCA.

With that said, unless you have a lot of large graphics files or movies or other hogs you want to serve up, or a database driven site like macnn, most HTML servers have very modest storage requirements. I only have a 200MB partition for HTML – but i do have a 1 GB partition for a database, in case i want to do some database driven web pages.

I'm split on my drive size issue. This quadra is replacing a PII 400 server that had 4+gigs of web content. It was mostly large graphics, and in my site redesign I'm planning on only posting only a select amount of pictures, so the size req will decrease. The last server had 12gig of hard drive space total. Just like you I had it split up into about 6 partitions. I'm thinking of ordering one of the 9gig drives from above, or grabbing a 9gig out of a Sun box I have and trying to get it working w/ the quadra.

I am very motivated by silence though. The quadra is extremly silent and I love that.

It might seem odd to move from a 400mhz to a 25mhz machine. But the previous server was just overkill, plus it took up more power and was loud. I was running OBSD 2.8 then 3.2 on it. I figure since I'm scaling my site down some, I can now have a quiet server, that won't be processor overkill.

What is the DB performance like? I had mysql on the last server, but it's quite a wimpy DB package. I use SQL Server extensively in my job, so I can't live without stored procedures, transactions, and a multitude of things mysql doesn't support. I'll probably go the Postgresql route. I would also consider MaxDB, but I don't think the Quadra has the horsepower. I really don't expect to do much of anything db intensive either.

Overall I like the challenge of trying to get unix to work on this box. I just downloaded the packages for 3.4 today and I'm going to toss that on tonight, hopefully it'll be a much better experience then NetBSD.

[Rainy Day]

Originally posted by Partisan01:
I have ordered from this site before surpluscomputers.com and they have adapters for around $10.

Interesting site. I noticed the 68->50pin adapters were $3 more! But when you're looking to buy a drive, that adapter can double the cost of the drive. And in my Quadra 605 (small pizza box), there isn't a whole lot of extra space for adapters and such. I'm quite happy with the two drives i have, although i may pick up another eventually. The thing about the eBay guy i mentioned above is he specializes in Mac drives. He even customizes their EPROM's for better Mac performance. But he commands a higher price for the drives he sells. For me, paying the premium price was worth it. I have been very delighted by the drive and its lack of noise. Even though i might be able to save a few bucks by buying elsewhere, i'd probably look at what he has to offer first, because he has such good customer service and even offers a warranty. For me it was a year, but i see he is now offering a two year warranty. And i am certain he stands behind it too because i bought my drive last year, but didn't get around to firing it up until just recently. The drive was running warmer than my old drive, and so i eMailed him to inquire about it. He said the faster RPM drives normally run warmer, but offered to trade it for another, or to give me a refund. I kept the drive.

It might seem odd to move from a 400mhz to a 25mhz machine.

Comparing clock speeds only is relevant only for like processors. In many ways a 25Mhz 68040 outperforms a 200+ Mhz 601. I didn't feel PPC Macs significantly outperformed the 68K Macs until the G3's came out.

But from what i hear, OpenBSD installs much more easily on Intel hardware, and Mac68K is their most difficult install.

But the previous server was just overkill, plus it took up more power and was loud.

And that was just the processor and its "cooling tower," i'll bet!

One of the things i like about the Quadra 605 is it draws only about 25 watts power. Environmentally friendly, and doesn't draw down the UPS quickly during a power outage.

What is the DB performance like?

I don't know yet. I've only compiled the Postgresql; haven't installed it yet.

Overall I like the challenge of trying to get unix to work on this box. I just downloaded the packages for 3.4 today and I'm going to toss that on tonight, hopefully it'll be a much better experience then NetBSD.

There are some challenges here and there. The more you know about Mac and UNIX, the easier it is. Overall i didn't understand UNIX directory structure sufficiently well a year and a half ago, when i started with OpenBSD on the Quadra, to do it the "right way." I fumbled about and managed to get something which was workable up and running. Since then i've been meaning to update things a bit. That's why i bought the larger drives. I'm finally getting close to putting the new improved server on-line, with the larger, quieter and properly partitioned drive, a DB, and Postfix. From what you've been saying about NetBSD, i'm glad i went with OpenBSD to begin with. I was attracted to it because of its emphasis on security, but almost threw in the towel a couple of times early on. I considered switching to NetBSD and – gasp – even Linux! (The Windoze of the UNIX world, IMO.) I'm now glad i stuck with OpenBSD. I've come to appreciate its efficiency. I just wish it supported more EtherNet cards.

The biggest problem i had was EtherNet. My card wasn't supported, but i didn't know that at first, nor why i couldn't connect to the network. Such a big learning curve i had! Then when i figured that out and bought a card which was supported, the card was incompatible with my 10/100 baseT auto-sensing switch! Got around that problem by dusting off an old 10-baseT hub i had which both the card and the 10/100 baseT switch liked. Was like figuring out a jigsaw puzzle, but i got it all going eventually.

Now i have this warm sense of self-satisfaction! Now all i need is a life!