[HN Gopher] Show HN: My 486 Server
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Show HN: My 486 Server
Author : smoppi
Score : 140 points
Date : 2022-01-16 19:34 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (486servu.dy.fi)
(TXT) w3m dump (486servu.dy.fi)
| vkoskiv wrote:
| I (fairly) recently installed modern Gentoo onto my 486DX2-66
| box. I think it has 32MB of RAM in there. Boots and works fine
| for the most part. Compiled tools and utilities work fine for the
| most part, but trying to run any interpreted code takes ages. I
| should put up a webserver on there and see if it can serve
| something!
|
| Here is me using it to log onto my webserver, it loads the SSH
| key from a 5.25" floppy:
| https://twitter.com/vkoskiv/status/1370116376166273025?s=20
| anthk wrote:
| OpenWRT for 486 would be a faster choice. Just crosscompile
| pkgs from another machine.
|
| You'll have http and gopher support granted. If libressl
| compile and run, place it under /opt, and maybe you'll be able
| to compile a gemini client.
| vkoskiv wrote:
| I should give that a go, yeah. The gentoo attempt was mostly
| to see how a modern desktop class linux distro would work on
| a system that old. Answer: Not very fast!
| anthk wrote:
| OpenWRT with musl would run much faster. Try to build a
| slim kernel with the OpenWRT toolchain.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Always funny to compare the amount of RAM in these machines to
| modern L3 cache sizes. You can get an AMD chip with 8X as much!
| detaro wrote:
| Same with storage. This laptop has a few times more RAM than
| my first PC had disk space. And in turn, I've used servers
| that had more RAM than my laptop today has SSD space.
| chizhik-pyzhik wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220116193852/http://486servu.d...
| ForOldHack wrote:
| Thank you, thank you, thank you.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Out of interest, how many requests does the hn-effect generate?
| Have any 'show-hn' participants ever provided this?
| smoppi wrote:
| This video answers to your question:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CeK1TnGhIs
| every wrote:
| I had a 486 server once. It was Novell NetWare 3.x running a LAN
| for a small nonprofit. Word Perfect, email, listserv, accounting
| and web access. Pretty sure I would never have exposed it to HN
| though (had it existed)...
| Moru wrote:
| Hah, I was running my webserver on a 286 (I think, a bit fuzzy
| memory there, was a while ago). Now get off my lawn. :-)
| glassprongs wrote:
| Very cool. How many of us did it take to DDOS the server? It
| doesn't load for me either :)
| smoppi wrote:
| iptraf on another computer, connected to the same hub:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CeK1TnGhIs
|
| Assuming that one "TCP entry" means one socket, that's a lot of
| SYN packets...
|
| Video from what it looks like on the server:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVKjVyM53sg
| smoppi wrote:
| The TCP/IP stack is compiled for 64 sockets. If the socket
| table is full, it just drops all new SYN packets and does not
| answer to them.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Just curious and totally not being critical, what was your
| thinking about dropping SYN vs responding with RST?
| smoppi wrote:
| I think the user will most probably keep pressing the
| F5/Refresh button anyway if the site is not working at the
| first try, so responding with a RST packet would just use
| more bandwidth and resources.
| smoppi wrote:
| For those who are interested in retrocomputing, you can download
| the actual software from there:
| http://sininenankka.dy.fi/~sami/fdshell/
|
| I recommend downloading the bootable floppy image, unless you
| want to see the source code.
| jug wrote:
| This currently looks like a poor 486 fighting for dear life.
|
| Edit: This also looks like a fairly Finnish thing to do. Thinking
| not only of Linux and hacking, but also their general demoscene
| culture and such things. See also:
| https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-04-16-finland-re...
| Hydraulix989 wrote:
| Didn't take long to overload it given it is a 486
| xd wrote:
| Can't connect but the OP put a video[1] up of the system ~4
| months back. Looks like it might be serving content direct from
| 3.5 and 5 1/4 floppies which might explain the lag :D
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be01GLFP-bQ
| chizhik-pyzhik wrote:
| of course i go look at the finnish person's other videos and
| they're about building a sauna
| smoppi wrote:
| Actually I upgraded the storage and the website is now served
| from a hard disk. I'm uploading a video to Youtube atm.
| xd wrote:
| Honestly, I prefer the floppy drives!
| smoppi wrote:
| Me too, and that's why the BBS service is still on a
| floppy.
| kxrm wrote:
| Not sure how big your site is, since it is down right now,
| but consider setting up a small RAM drive.
| gokhan wrote:
| Looks like the server is asleep since no one requested for a page
| recently. I'm constantly refreshing the page until I receive a
| response, just to prime it for my fellow HNers in case this
| reaches top of HN.
| smoppi wrote:
| My OOM handler killed the HTTP server process. Now I restarted
| it - the HTTPD process, not the computer.
| sabujp wrote:
| she's dead jim
| [deleted]
| flatiron wrote:
| Unrelated 486 story: I used a 486 66 dx2 as my computer until
| 2001 when I went to college and used my grad money for an actual
| computer. Get to school and they limit the internet to 1 gig per
| day. Discovered it's by MAC address. Not by LAN port. So
| thanksgiving break grab that bad boy and drag it to school. It
| ran FreeBSD and I made a SOCKS proxy that just changes it's MAC
| after about 1 gig of usage. Have it out to everyone on our floor
| and we destroyed Kazaa and Limewire. Good times.
| mobilio wrote:
| Also unrelated 486 story - around this time i have similar
| machine (486 Overdrive) with two LANs that works as router.
|
| OS - FloppyFW: https://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/
|
| Because ISP used PPTP as way to providing internet and i need
| to share internet on few machines.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| I did too, but that pesky F00F bug, knocked out our router
| once a week, until we traced who was owning us.
| anthk wrote:
| I miss floppy distros such as Basic Linux or NeHaBoDi,
| nethack 3.4.3 under a floppy.
| [deleted]
| anthk wrote:
| Did you use Links and Pine too? Because reading web pages over
| Links/Lynx was still possible in 2001. FVWM, Urxvt, Lynx and
| ImageMagick for images would fly as a daily machine.
| flatiron wrote:
| I did when I was home on that box. Even though Netscape ran
| fairly well with FreeBSD's Linux compat layer.
|
| I applied for my university using lynx on that 486. Worked
| ok(ish).
| aftergibson wrote:
| Awww. I think the little guy might be struggling.
| lottin wrote:
| It's slashdotted.
| diveanon wrote:
| smoppi wrote:
| Hello. I wrote a multitasking 16-bit real mode "operating system"
| that works on every IBM PC compatible computer, and a TCP/IP
| stack for it. Then I wrote an HTTP server for it.
| akkartik wrote:
| I'm very interested in the network stack, having explored it
| for a while for https://github.com/akkartik/mu before giving
| up. What sort of network card do you support?
| smoppi wrote:
| Everything in my "operating system" is 16-bit x86 code. It
| uses regular DOS packet drivers. I have also started writing
| my own DOS kernel, but it is not ready yet. The server uses
| FreeDOS kernel. That's why I write the "operating system" in
| quotation marks.
|
| And because my TCP/IP stack is 16-bit code, it probably won't
| work for your system. It's just a DOS program that has an
| interrupt service routine that the other programs can call.
| soupshield wrote:
| Can you share how it's doing cpu/memory wise and his it's
| holding up in general under what I assume I heavy load from HN?
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Not holding up great it seems :)
| jeffbee wrote:
| We used to serve serious traffic off 486 machines, so if
| anything it's probably a software issue. Perhaps
| FreeBSD/i386 would be an appropriate choice?
|
| If you weren't there you probably don't realize that the
| 486 was a huge leap over the 386. We don't get 100%
| generational improvements these days. The 486 enjoyed a
| long life and its later incarnations were giving
| contemporaneous Pentium models a run for the money, and I'm
| not even counting socket-compatible upgrades from AMD and
| so forth. You could put 64MB RAM and big L2 caches and
| there were PCI motherboards in the later 486 years.
|
| Consider that the AMD Geode was basically the last 486
| standing, and it was (is) more than adequate for routing
| between or firewalling fast ethernet links, serving HTTP
| etc.
| drzaiusapelord wrote:
| Yep this! People would regularly run windows 95 on a 486
| with 8-16mb of ram. This was their daily driver which did
| word, dial up/aol/prodigy, messaging, games, etc. I think
| the reaction here that someone is able to run a little
| web server off of it is perhaps a bit overdone. Yes, its
| impressive he wrote his own stack, but the hardware
| itself is still beefy.
| smoppi wrote:
| Yeah, a 486 is not a slow CPU - not even the 25 MHz SX
| version that the server has. But Windows 95 is a 32-bit
| protected mode OS. My OS also works on a 8088, but I
| don't have a 8088 computer that I could use as a server.
| [deleted]
| smoppi wrote:
| My system is 100% 16-bit code and cannot access more than
| 640 kB of memory, and that's why it is so limited. I
| could probably increase the maximum amount of sockets and
| file handles to give it more capacity, but it still has
| its limits.
| randombits0 wrote:
| The least you could do is EMS/XMS. Quick, somebody give
| this person a copy of DesqView/386! :)
| ForOldHack wrote:
| They probably rolled there own, omitting all the edge
| cases pertaining to a coagulated mess of spaghetti code.
| velmu wrote:
| Loaded now. This is what's there:
|
| "Tama palvelin kayttaa graafista 16-bittista lEEt/OS-
| kayttoliittymaa. Jarjestelma on yhdella 1,44 megatavun 3,5
| tuuman levykkeella. Tama sivusto on kiintolevylla. BBS on
| 360 kilotavun 5,25 tuuman levykkeella. Vieraile myos BBS-
| purkissa portissa 486 (telnet)."
|
| Translated:
|
| "Server uses a graphic lEEt/OS-user interface. The system
| is on a single 1.44 MB 3.5 floppy disk. This site is on a
| hard drive and the BBS is on a 360 KB 5.25 inch floppy
| disk. Visit the BBS on port 486 (telnet)."
| smoppi wrote:
| Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erM0K0oXk4M
|
| In the end I minimized the HTTPSERV.APP window so that
| scrolling down the text would not consume too much CPU time.
| smoppi wrote:
| Right now I cannot even access it locally from my lan, but it
| does answer to some of my pings. The HDD led is also
| blinking, which means that it is in fact answering to some
| HTTP requests. The TCP/IP stack is compiled for 64
| simultaneous sockets.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| Please paste an image up on Archive.org, so at least we can
| stare at the 'pre-meltdown' server.
|
| P.s. I used a 486 as a router for years, and even upgraded
| it when I found a Pentium Overdrive... which of course was
| vulnerable to the F00F bug...
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Next iteration: Caching HTTP server
| rndgermandude wrote:
| You Finns and your "(free) operating system[s] (just a hobby,
| won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT
| clones." :D
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| This "Linus" guy won't go anywhere. No one wants a half-done
| kernel that is just a hobby.
| FpUser wrote:
| Something close. In the end of 80's I had preemptive
| multithreading and scheduling right inside my old DOS program.
| Had to switch timer interrupt frequency to 4kHz for that.
| fouc wrote:
| What is the lowest specs required to handle the HN effect
| anyways?
|
| What is the most retro computer that ever served traffic from
| HN's top page without going down?
| viltie wrote:
| sage & hide
| Mystlix wrote:
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(page generated 2022-01-16 23:00 UTC)