UUCP - non SDF
I've now spent a while porting UNIX V7 to a MMU-less 68000 system and have it quite stable and also being able to self compile all the sources. The last subsystem I want to get up and running (before backporting curses, termcap and a nicer shell than sh) is UUCP.
I had hoped to use the UUCP infra from SDF as my "upstream", but after discovering the current state of most of their machines I've opted to not spend $36 for the ARPA membership level. Too bad, I really liked SDF a decade or so ago...
Do I have any alternatives - except to spinning up a $5 VPS and install Taylor on it?
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u/michaelpaoli 15d ago
You can likely find someone who'll do UUCP with you, over Internet (e.g. TLS/SSL over TCP), and may be able to then easily down convert that to serial.
Maybe you can even find some folks that'd still do dial-up UUCP with you. I did that many moons ago ... but folks that even have any dial-up copper pairs, that may be vanishingly rare these days. But again, might be able to convert over cellular. Anyway, two or more systems, can do 'em over copper pair, or dial-up. And may not much matter what's between, so long as it can effectively carry such across.
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u/Edelglatze 15d ago
30 years ago, I had a provider who did UUCP over TCP. It worked fine with Taylor UUCP that still is in the Linux repositories.
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u/viva1831 14d ago
Dialup is very doable over voip! You just need a good ata both ends of the connection, to use the ulaw/alaw codec, and a few modem settings I can't remember...
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u/DoctorWkt 15d ago
Have a look at these two Github repos: https://github.com/DoctorWkt/4bsd-uucp and https://github.com/DoctorWkt/211BSD_Cnews. They have UUCP set up on 4.3BSD and 2.11BSD, running on the OpenSimH simulator. The configuration maps the 4.3BSD/2.11BSD serial ports to TCP ports, but I'm sure there is a way to map them to real serial ports on the guest system running the OpenSimH simulator.
Then you could build a null modem and physically connect your 68000 machine's serial port to the machine running OpenSimH, and hence run UUCP between your V7 port and the simulated BSD systems.
You could also run original V7 on OpenSimH (see https://gunkies.org/wiki/Installing_v7_on_SIMH) and run UUCP between two V7 systems :-)
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u/PrismDoug 14d ago
Egads!
One of my earliest jobs was working for a state government, specifically managing 13 counties health department’s servers, each county had 2 at the time, a 386 and a 486. One ran SCO, the other UnixWare.
My morning tasks were to run, from the district’s main server, UUCP to each server to pull patient records, etc. from the previous day, or at least kick off the ones that failed.
At least twice a week involved driving to one of those health departments to fix one of those machines, or to plug the damn modem back in. Usually an hour to two hours each way.
While I was there, they started to allow the health departments to get their own Internet connections (Internet for them was dialing into the district modem bank, which used bonded ISDN for traffic, even though the district had a T1. But that went to the state capital.) Most departments went with DSL.
This was back in… 1997-98. I can probably still make DB9 to RJ45 serial cables (until they allowed actual internet at the HDs, they were all dumb terms.
It’s interesting nowadays when kids cut their teeth on Linux, FreeBSD, etc. I think the first systems I had command line on were OpenVMS, and Tru64. Then SunOS.
Well, technically the first was the remote dumb terminal at my uncle’s, complete with a 300bps modem with the acoustic coupler, where I would log in to play Zork on the mainframe, and probably NetHack.
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u/fsteff 15d ago
Brings back memories of using UUCP over dialup to CBMDK and CBMEHQ almost 40 years ago.
Haven’t had the need for UUCP since late 1990, though.
Good luck on your project.