5 ms·

I remember a coworker having to fight with an old platform's build not working because our user/group IDs were bigger than 2^16. I can't remember which utility

by whiatp 5mo ago

I remember a coworker having to fight with an old platform's build not working because our user/group IDs were bigger than 2^16. I can't remember which utility was causing the problem, I'd have to guess tar. This is when we learned to play the archive a VM game.

butvacuum 5mo ago
I can't imagine theres much overlap between "we will need to update this firmware for the next decade." and "Let's bet the farm on the documentation being perfect, and all the downloads still available."
cyberpunk 5mo ago
I know a defence company that has a bunch of vaxes stored in low oxygen environments because they legally have to be able to provide software updates to firmware they’ve written for the next 20 or so years and it was written on a vax. They had some great stories trying to get something or other running again where they had to fly one of the original designers over to hand solder a board back into action. How we do that today is a bit of an interesting problem I don’t think they’ve convincingly solved; basically maintaining nightly builds forever — a couple 1U’s of kubernetes in deep storage ain’t gonna do it, you’re not gonna be able to solder a xeon back to life.. I know I’d rather be trying get a load of c99 rebuilt for some mips or other after 20 years that some random version of rust.
- jitler 5mo ago
  > I know a defence company that has a bunch of vaxes stored in low oxygen environments because they legally have to be able to provide software updates to firmware they’ve written for the next 20 or so years and it was written on a vax. So uh, will these ever make it to an auction site you think?
  - shrubble 5mo ago
    I have an Acer Chromebook with Celeron N3060 CPU and it runs the SIMH VAX emulator with 64MB for the VAX at the same speed as a Vaxstation 4000/60 and likely the disk is much faster. I like OpenVMS and am slowly learning more about it; no reason to wait until you see those hit eBay :-)
- IshKebab 5mo ago
  > I know I’d rather be trying get a load of c99 rebuilt for some mips or other after 20 years that some random version of rust. Rust 1.0 is 11 years old and it's still trivial to compile Rust code from then. I doubt that will change in the next 9 years. C is an absolute nightmare in comparison. I tried to compile some old C code I had for Nordic nRF51 chips, only a few years after the chips became available. I gave up. Broken links, missing documentation, etc. etc. I can see why other people here are saying it's standard practice to archive a VM. Not really necessary for Rust.
  - cyberpunk 5mo ago
    shrug I guess we have different experiences. Any even small sized rust application I've come across rivals nodejs for amount of deps it pulls in. Sure, just vendor them in, simples, right?
    - IshKebab 5mo ago
      You could do (it is simple), but all the code is stored on crates.io so there's no real need. An exception is for crates that wrap C code which might get the code from elsewhere but those are quite rare.
      - cyberpunk 5mo ago
        And they’re immutable, forever? No one can pull a leftpad?
        cdirkx 5mo ago
        Yes, they are immutable. It's only possible to "yank" a specific version, which will prevent new dependencies, but it will still be available for download for existing dependencies. https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/commands/cargo-yank.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/commands/cargo-yank.html
        dwattttt 5mo ago
- mariuolo 5mo ago
  Isn't Charon VAX officially supported by HP/Compaq/DEC these days?

by whiatp 5mo ago

butvacuum 5mo ago

I can't imagine theres much overlap between "we will need to update this firmware for the next decade." and "Let's bet the farm on the documentation being perfect, and all the downloads still available."

cyberpunk 5mo ago

I know a defence company that has a bunch of vaxes stored in low oxygen environments because they legally have to be able to provide software updates to firmware they’ve written for the next 20 or so years and it was written on a vax. They had some great stories trying to get something or other running again where they had to fly one of the original designers over to hand solder a board back into action. How we do that today is a bit of an interesting problem I don’t think they’ve convincingly solved; basically maintaining nightly builds forever — a couple 1U’s of kubernetes in deep storage ain’t gonna do it, you’re not gonna be able to solder a xeon back to life.. I know I’d rather be trying get a load of c99 rebuilt for some mips or other after 20 years that some random version of rust.

jitler 5mo ago
> I know a defence company that has a bunch of vaxes stored in low oxygen environments because they legally have to be able to provide software updates to firmware they’ve written for the next 20 or so years and it was written on a vax. So uh, will these ever make it to an auction site you think?
- shrubble 5mo ago
  I have an Acer Chromebook with Celeron N3060 CPU and it runs the SIMH VAX emulator with 64MB for the VAX at the same speed as a Vaxstation 4000/60 and likely the disk is much faster. I like OpenVMS and am slowly learning more about it; no reason to wait until you see those hit eBay :-)
IshKebab 5mo ago
> I know I’d rather be trying get a load of c99 rebuilt for some mips or other after 20 years that some random version of rust. Rust 1.0 is 11 years old and it's still trivial to compile Rust code from then. I doubt that will change in the next 9 years. C is an absolute nightmare in comparison. I tried to compile some old C code I had for Nordic nRF51 chips, only a few years after the chips became available. I gave up. Broken links, missing documentation, etc. etc. I can see why other people here are saying it's standard practice to archive a VM. Not really necessary for Rust.
- cyberpunk 5mo ago
  shrug I guess we have different experiences. Any even small sized rust application I've come across rivals nodejs for amount of deps it pulls in. Sure, just vendor them in, simples, right?
  - IshKebab 5mo ago
    You could do (it is simple), but all the code is stored on crates.io so there's no real need. An exception is for crates that wrap C code which might get the code from elsewhere but those are quite rare.
    - cyberpunk 5mo ago
      And they’re immutable, forever? No one can pull a leftpad?
      - cdirkx 5mo ago
        Yes, they are immutable. It's only possible to "yank" a specific version, which will prevent new dependencies, but it will still be available for download for existing dependencies. https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/commands/cargo-yank.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/commands/cargo-yank.html
        dwattttt 5mo ago
mariuolo 5mo ago
Isn't Charon VAX officially supported by HP/Compaq/DEC these days?