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

[John Wallace]

On May 6, 9:57 pm, presnyprek... at gmail.com 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 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

OK, a couple of things I meant to post but forgot, sorry.

1) Maybe you already knew this one: afaik, mouse movement in Windows
is effectively done at interrupt level. If the num lock light goes on
and off in response to the numlock key, the keyboard has power and its
microcontroller is alive. But no more can be assumed from that. If
moving the mouse moves the cursor, the processor is alive and
executing code. But processes may not be being scheduled in the usual
way.

2) The strange "file is there, file is not there" behaviour is a
feature introduced in Vista. It's related to apps that want to write
files to system-protected directories. When such a write happens in
Vista or later, it doesn't end up in the real system directory, there
is a shadow directory elsewhere that will get the file, that *some*
(but not all) APIs know about. It's a band-aid on an elastoplast to
work around a Defective by Design security model, but this is Windows.
I had a link to a brief writeup, but I forgot where I put it; it's
more secure that way :(

And one for Paul: there are backup vendors that claim their "solution"
can do a "bare metal" restore onto dissimilar hardware. I'm not 100%
convinced. Nor am I 100% convinced by the backup vendors who claim to
be able to back up open files. But hey, what do I know. As long as the
vendor has got the sale and it looks like the backup has succeeded,
what does it matter if the restore doesn't work right.

hth
cjw