Ancient UNIX; was Re: [Gllug] loadavg

[Ian Northeast]

Nix wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, Ian Northeast said:
> [snip fascinating wonderful weird tale]
> 
>>Anyone else here ever seen UNIX function with no IP stack? I did, last
>>year.
> 
> 
> Hasn't everyone?
> 
> In my case it was an SGI Indigo (not Indy) back in 1992 or thereabouts:
> the local hardware deity had been cleaning the (hideously filled with
> metallic dust) inside with a tiny custom-modified vacuum cleaner, when
> a capacitor or something on the NIC snapped off and went zooming up
> the pipe.
> 
> But the machine was still needed, so while the hardware deity replaced
> the capacitor and modified the vacuum cleaner to blow, not suck, said
> Indigo was running with no NIC, and I was *trying* to develop on it.
> 
> It was remarkably difficult, not least because the only name it could
> resolve was `localhost'. (Whoops.)

No, I meant no IP stack. Not no interfaces. Loopback didn't exist 
either. It denied the existence of IP: "protocol not supported". In UTS 
the IP stack is not truly in the kernel, it is built by a script shortly 
after IPL (boot). There are a number of daemons to support it. When the 
ethernet "cards" it wanted weren't available, the whole lot went tits 
up. All the daemons failed to start. No IP. Not at all.

It was only possible to "use" this system because it has excellent SNA 
support. This is why I know the above. I had to log in to a convenient 
zOS (MVS) machine which does both IP and SNA and hop across via SNA.

I did mention that this thing is weird didn't I?

Regards, Ian


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