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

[Paul Sture]

Hi Nathan,

On Sun, 06 May 2012 13:57:31 -0700, presnypreklad wrote:

> 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 don't run VBox under an admin account.  IIRC the only times I've needed 
to log on to an admin account was to install it, and again to add the 
VirtualBox Extensions package.

> 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,

Ah, I find a brute force

dir C:\*filename* /s

done under the admin account is usually more reliable than using the GUI 
search.

> 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.

Yes, these things do come and get you every now and again.  The "Sigh and 
Try Again" approach eventually drives you nuts.

> 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.)

I came across the "magic, banned" thing a year or two ago, and notice 
that MS now refer to it specifically in the EULAs.

The real pain in this area is that both MS and the various backup 
solution providers seem to assume that reinstalling from scratch is 
normal behaviour.

> 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.

Yep, back to wipe and reinstall - I hate that practice as it values your 
time at zero worth.

> 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.

I am pretty impressed with the speed of Linux in comparison with XP on a 
couple of dual boot systems I have here.  VAX/VMS on SIMH on Linux is 
pleasantly fast.  'tis a pity that it's so out of date.

> 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
> 

Thanks for the link.

-- 
Paul Sture