3 ms·

Ah! I solved that easily enough. Internet Explorer 8 works okay for the webby front ends to operate the transmitter equipment. How do you run that, in this day

Ah! I solved that easily enough. Internet Explorer 8 works okay for the webby front ends to operate the transmitter equipment. How do you run that, in this day and age, safely? Run it in Windows XP, in a VM. Now here's the clever bit - qemu will allow you to expose the keyboard, mouse, and framebuffer as a VNC server. So you set up Apache Guacamole to point a VNC client at the VM, and then "normal people" can log in, operate the transmitter, and log out again. You can do a lot of sneaky things with that, including setting up headless X, running VNC on it pointed at your qemu VM, and then streaming the headless X servers's framebuffer out with ffmpeg. Yes sometimes work can be a bit boring with not much to do, why do you ask?

keepamovin 6mo ago
That is pretty cool, man. VM with XP in QEMU sending VNC frames to Guacamole clients on the web. BrowserBox is basically the same pattern as this setup (streaming graphics from some browsing substrate somewhere to web clients) except architecture is different: a modern box on the same private network runs the BrowserBox server, and the win box (QEMUd or otherwise) connects to its http endpoint, using whatever browser it has (tested back to IE5 even, tho that's a way more buggy browser than IE6. IE8 should be golden). That way you get the full modern web, no compromises. But crucially the web is not actually accessing your legacy box. So, no comrp0mises, ie., no easy vulns. Especially a concern for older browsers. Plus, we've got policy controls to lock down capabilities (copy, paste, URL lists, internal IP access controls, etc). In your case it sounds like you are running the webby servers on the XP box, too, so BrowserBox would link back into those over the same private network, render them on the modern box, send it back to the XP box, then clients can connect over the QEMU VNC bridge you already have. Alternately you could just do away with the Win XP browsing, and have BrowserBox connect to your webby endpoints for transmitters wherever you run them, and then expose that browsing graphics stream to clients over whatever endpoint you want. Many options! I like your ffmpeg out setup. How did that go? Share more about that? Pretty interesting, I love this old architectures, and legacy systems compatibility quests.
- ErroneousBosh 6mo ago
  I should do a blog post and stick it on here, right? > In your case it sounds like you are running the webby servers on the XP box, too, Yeah - it's a web front end to some specialised software written on I guess Microsoft C++ (if I had time, enthusiasm, and a copy of it lying around I suppose I'd wave Ghidra at it and see what happens). I'll look into BrowserBox, that sounds handy. > I like your ffmpeg out setup. How did that go? Share more about that? Pretty interesting, I love this old architectures, and legacy systems compatibility quests. Surprisingly well. I think you could probably stream it straight to Twitch or something if you wanted. Yeah, this sounds like a blog post.
  - keepamovin 6mo ago
    You should! It would be a good read. And likely help others. Please send me an email when you get to it: cris@dosaygo.com
    - ErroneousBosh 6mo ago
      I will, won't be until maybe after the weekend though.

keepamovin 6mo ago

That is pretty cool, man. VM with XP in QEMU sending VNC frames to Guacamole clients on the web. BrowserBox is basically the same pattern as this setup (streaming graphics from some browsing substrate somewhere to web clients) except architecture is different: a modern box on the same private network runs the BrowserBox server, and the win box (QEMUd or otherwise) connects to its http endpoint, using whatever browser it has (tested back to IE5 even, tho that's a way more buggy browser than IE6. IE8 should be golden). That way you get the full modern web, no compromises. But crucially the web is not actually accessing your legacy box. So, no comrp0mises, ie., no easy vulns. Especially a concern for older browsers. Plus, we've got policy controls to lock down capabilities (copy, paste, URL lists, internal IP access controls, etc). In your case it sounds like you are running the webby servers on the XP box, too, so BrowserBox would link back into those over the same private network, render them on the modern box, send it back to the XP box, then clients can connect over the QEMU VNC bridge you already have. Alternately you could just do away with the Win XP browsing, and have BrowserBox connect to your webby endpoints for transmitters wherever you run them, and then expose that browsing graphics stream to clients over whatever endpoint you want. Many options! I like your ffmpeg out setup. How did that go? Share more about that? Pretty interesting, I love this old architectures, and legacy systems compatibility quests.

ErroneousBosh 6mo ago
I should do a blog post and stick it on here, right? > In your case it sounds like you are running the webby servers on the XP box, too, Yeah - it's a web front end to some specialised software written on I guess Microsoft C++ (if I had time, enthusiasm, and a copy of it lying around I suppose I'd wave Ghidra at it and see what happens). I'll look into BrowserBox, that sounds handy. > I like your ffmpeg out setup. How did that go? Share more about that? Pretty interesting, I love this old architectures, and legacy systems compatibility quests. Surprisingly well. I think you could probably stream it straight to Twitch or something if you wanted. Yeah, this sounds like a blog post.
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  You should! It would be a good read. And likely help others. Please send me an email when you get to it: cris@dosaygo.com
  - ErroneousBosh 6mo ago
    I will, won't be until maybe after the weekend though.