stepleton
Veteran Member
We all knew the rivalry was real! (Heck, netcraft confirmed it!) (old joke)
For months I've been connecting my mid-1980s 4.2BSD box (one of these) to the Internet (in a very limited way!) through a Raspberry Pi (acting as an Ethernet bridge) and an Amazon AWS host. This has allowed me to serve webpages to the open internet from the ancient machine, which was good fun.
A recent update to the Pi's OS has changed all this. The Pi will happily be a bridge for a modern Linux box, but it refuses to pass along Ethernet frames from the old BSD machine! I've tried to understand the problem but have not had much success.
If you think you know your Linux networking, then I have a challenge for you! https://unix.stackexchange.com/ques...ackets-from-a-vintage-bsd-machine-but-packets
I've done some pretty detailed investigating there --- check it out if you like a nice ASCII-art diagram.
But it could be that the crucial knowledge lies in the wisdom of the retro community. Can anyone think of any difference between the commodity Ethernet frames of 1986 and the ones we get today? I've done some hexdumps of ping exchanges involving the old machine (see the link above for more context, though), and they don't really look any different to me to exchanges with a modern computer!
In other words, just looking at ping packets and their data link (Ethernet) headers, I can't even tell how Linux on the Raspberry Pi is detecting that the old BSD machine is any different from a new computer. But maybe you know: is there a difference that I'm missing somehow? Some change to Ethernet over 3.5 decades that's made it possible to discriminate? This has been a real mystery!
For months I've been connecting my mid-1980s 4.2BSD box (one of these) to the Internet (in a very limited way!) through a Raspberry Pi (acting as an Ethernet bridge) and an Amazon AWS host. This has allowed me to serve webpages to the open internet from the ancient machine, which was good fun.
A recent update to the Pi's OS has changed all this. The Pi will happily be a bridge for a modern Linux box, but it refuses to pass along Ethernet frames from the old BSD machine! I've tried to understand the problem but have not had much success.
If you think you know your Linux networking, then I have a challenge for you! https://unix.stackexchange.com/ques...ackets-from-a-vintage-bsd-machine-but-packets
I've done some pretty detailed investigating there --- check it out if you like a nice ASCII-art diagram.
But it could be that the crucial knowledge lies in the wisdom of the retro community. Can anyone think of any difference between the commodity Ethernet frames of 1986 and the ones we get today? I've done some hexdumps of ping exchanges involving the old machine (see the link above for more context, though), and they don't really look any different to me to exchanges with a modern computer!
In other words, just looking at ping packets and their data link (Ethernet) headers, I can't even tell how Linux on the Raspberry Pi is detecting that the old BSD machine is any different from a new computer. But maybe you know: is there a difference that I'm missing somehow? Some change to Ethernet over 3.5 decades that's made it possible to discriminate? This has been a real mystery!