People,
My usual mode of operation when updating OSes is to use a new Hard Disk and install the latest version of the OS (sometimes bleeding edge) and to keep the old disk as an archive drive. So I have a lot of old drives and recently I have been going back through the old SATA and then IDE drives - which has been an interesting archaeological dig! Today I started looking at stuff on this old RH server which was used as a Qmail mail server, EZMLM mailing list manager and a host for a few small web sites. It had not been looked at since the machine had been turned off a long, long time ago - to my surprise it booted up with no problems! Now all I need to do is daisy-chain the Adaptec SCSI controller to an external box with another 4 SCSI drives in it to complete the archaeological exploration.
It was a little strange but pleasant looking at all this very old stuff - knowing with hindsight how the users, lists and sites developed after their modest beginnings. I guess I got a bit nostalgic and decided to continue to keep the box (it is the only old box I have that can accommodate the old Adaptec ISA board) but it occurred to me that it would be an interesting exercise to try and virtualise the system - is this possible? - could I create an image from the old 2GB SCSI boot disk and run it as a virtual machine somehow?
For the record, my first RH OS was v4.0 - which I used in a commercial environment (we told the boss it was an updated version of UNIX!) - I had used a variety of other distros for fun going back to Slackware and before that Softlanding Linux System (SLS):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softlanding_Linux_System
RH upset me when they took their distro completely commercial and I was cranky for a while but I was very happy when RH finally realised their mistake and createde Fedora Core 1 - which I eagerly lept into!
Also, I still have my first-ever (electronic) computer (I had a plastic one when I was kid that had three bits and the clock cycle involved manually pushing and pulling a lever . .) - an Exidy Sorcerer from 1978 which had to have programs and data loaded from audio audio cassettes (!):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exidy_Sorcerer
and my first computer with floppy disks - the luggable Osborne 1 computer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_1
I wouldn't be surprised if I could still boot them up as well! . . although it would be a fair bit more messing around . .
Thanks,
Phil.
On 09/30/2016 02:40 AM, Philip Rhoades wrote:
It was a little strange but pleasant looking at all this very old stuff
- knowing with hindsight how the users, lists and sites developed after
their modest beginnings. I guess I got a bit nostalgic and decided to continue to keep the box (it is the only old box I have that can accommodate the old Adaptec ISA board) but it occurred to me that it would be an interesting exercise to try and virtualise the system - is this possible? - could I create an image from the old 2GB SCSI boot disk and run it as a virtual machine somehow?
Shouldn't be a problem. The only issue would be whether the installed OS has a driver for the emulated scsi drive. If you used the emulated IDE instead, you would need to mount the image (or drive) locally and edit the fstab to change the /dev/sd* entries to /dev/hd*. I expect the bootloader would be LILO which I think uses BIOS calls to load the OS, so that should work.
-
Philip Rhoades -
Samuel Sieb