[Info-vax] FreeAXP loses network connectivity when laptop is woken up from "sleep"

[presnypreklad at gmail.com]

Hi Paul:

Well, no, the "VBoxManage clonehd" created the vmdk disk image in the expected place (\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox), but the way this happened was really weird. My mistake was that I forgot to run the DOS box with Administrator privileges. It went through the entire 'clonehd' process (~15 minutes) and completed successfully. But when I did 'dir' the file was not there.

I did try searching the whole disk, but the Vista search function was useless (took forever). Just now I remembered I have 'WinDirStat' installed and within five minutes I had the whole disk searched and zoomed in on the file - sure enough, it's in \Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox, but when I execute 'dir' without Administrator privileges, it doesn't show up in the directory listing. Mystery solved, partially. What I don't understand is how I can create a file in that directory without Admin privileges, and yet not be able to see it. That's just stupid. It's taken me over a decade to somewhat get over my aversion to Windows, but I'll tell you, things like this still get my goat.

As for cloning the drive from VirtualBox to VMware, I didn't have any significant problem. XP booted up fine, to a point. Of course, it complained bitterly about all the new hardware for which it could find no drivers, but all that went away when I installed the VMware guest tools. However, in the end I did have to reinstall, because the old installation of XP was single-processor and there is no way to change that to dual-processor except to reinstall. (Well, I did find a magic, banned, license-invalidating incantation to do it, but it just rendered the system unbootable with a blue screen that would flash for a short moment and then disappear.)

And, yes, the whole process of messing with VM, VMware, and XP installation/reinstallation was quite time-consuming. At one point, there was even a glitch that caused Vista to become almost completely unresponsive. I could still move the mouse and I was able using CTRL-ALT-DEL to issue a Restart. Other than that, though, it was hosed. And even when it wasn't grinding to a halt, throughout the process the system was very sluggish.

It got me to thinking (again) about how snappy an ancient OS like VMS was/is, compared to a "modern" OS like Vista running on hardware many, many times more powerful than the machines VMS ran on.

This ties in nicely to an article I'm reading: "On Building Systems That Fail" by Fernando Corbato, who worked on the CTSS and Multics projects. I assume everyone here is familiar with it, but if you aren't, it's highly recommended, Turing Award-winning stuff.

http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs162/sp10/hand-outs/Corbato-turing.pdf

Nathan