Ltning (@ltning@weirdr.net)

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Ltning » 🌐 2026-03-07
@ltning@weirdr.net

UPgraded this Pentium Pro to #NetBSD 11.0-RC2 - Thanks, logix! ;)

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Screenfetch output showing an Xterm window with the specifications of the machine: NetBSD 11, Intel 686-class CPU, R200-class GPU, 492MiB RAM (?)

Emoji reactions:

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Ltning » 🌐 2026-03-07
@ltning@weirdr.net

load averages: 7.70, 4.09, 2.66; up 0+00:41:42 21:55:40
74 processes: 3 runnable, 69 sleeping, 2 on CPU
CPU states: 28.4% user, 49.6% nice, 15.9% system, 4.6% interrupt, 1.3% idle
Memory: 241M Act, 120M Inact, 14M Wired, 57M Exec, 175M File, 5056K Free
Swap: 5120M Total, 45M Used, 5075M Free / Pools: 105M Used / Network: 67K In, 1035K Out

PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU CPU COMMAND
686 root 17 10 59M 12M CPU/0 18:22 82.52% 82.52% snac
766 nginx 77 0 20M 8116K kqueue/0 0:51 31.15% 31.15% nginx
838 nginx 25 0 21M 8648K RUN/1 0:53 26.61% 26.61% nginx
734 root 76 0 72M 35M poll/0 5:19 22.22% 22.22% X
2528 root 73 10 29M 7124K wait/1 0:03 5.40% 4.00% pkg_add
1445 ltning 38 0 31M 12M RUN/1 0:57 3.76% 3.76% urxvt
3177 root 16 10 6144K 1228K RUN/1 0:00 13.17% 3.42% sh
3916 ltning 42 0 6748K 2456K CPU/1 0:01 2.45% 2.44% top
1332 ltning 85 0 7620K 2152K select/0 0:01 1.07% 1.07% xrootconsole
1103 ltning 85 0 42M 15M poll/1 0:52 0.93% 0.93% gkrellm
2342 root 77 10 29M 16M wait/0 1:09 0.68% 0.68% pkgin
1113 ltning 84 0 32M 11M select/1 0:50 0.59% 0.59% wmaker
0 root 127 0 0K 21M xcall/1 0:35 0.29% 0.29% [system]

3 ★ 1 ↺

retrogaming_bot boosted

Ltning » 🌐 2026-03-05
@ltning@weirdr.net

Taking a break from #retrocomputing .

#beer

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A glass of red ale (Spitfire) with a perfect head. The mug is from the Ottakringer brewery in Austria, and has a handle. There is a candle behind the glass which makes the beer glow amber. My reading glasses folded up next to it.

12 ★ 1 ↺

retrogaming_bot boosted

Ltning » 🌐 2026-02-28
@ltning@weirdr.net

Before and After pics of my last cleaning spree in my "lab"..
(It was much worse before the "before" pic, but posting that would have required me to add a CW, I think..)

#RetroComputing #Desk #Clutter

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"Before" picture: A messy desk: From left, a black desktop PC (a 386), on top of it a open benchtable build with a dual Penitum CPU motherboard and various expansion cards. In the middle a display, to the right another open benchtable with no board installed. The desk is extremely cluttered with RAM sticks, various tools, paper stickers, various bits and bobs, scissors, cables and whatnot.

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"After" picture: Same as above, but all the clutter is gone, revealing a black desk, a white keyboard, a white and a black mouse, and not much else. The screen shows a NetBSD desktop with Windowmaker.

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gloriouscow » 🌐 2026-03-01
@gloriouscow@oldbytes.space

@ltning your before looks like what my after might be

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Ltning » 🌐 2026-03-01
@ltning@weirdr.net

There was a point at which I saw no end to this project, and that was indeed a possible end result.

Now I'll just sit here and look at it (and post about it) and see how long it can stay this way .. :P

[tj] - knows what your packets are thinking » 🌐 2026-03-01
@tj@altelectron.org.uk

@ltning I could do that, it would just make the floor unusable.

Great job!

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Ltning » 🌐 2026-03-01
@ltning@weirdr.net

Thank you kindly. Also for making me snort coffee.
I did receive some thinly veiled complaints about the (lack of) floor from others who use the space over the last few weeks.

Bart van Leeuwen » 🌐 2026-03-01
@semanticfire@mastodon.social

@ltning good boy 😎

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Anders Gulden Olstad » 🌐 2026-03-01
@andersgo@infosec.exchange

@semanticfire @ltning Clean desk policy compliance achieved.

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1 ★ 0 ↺

Ltning » 🌐 2026-03-01
@ltning@weirdr.net

It's about the only policy I comply with .. And only temporarily. :P

CC: @semanticfire@mastodon.social

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Ltning » 🌐 2026-03-01
@ltning@weirdr.net

Woof!

1 ★ 0 ↺

Ltning » 🌐 2026-02-23
@ltning@weirdr.net

#Windowmaker on a 5K display is ... fun. Especially when it's normally configured for a 2256x1504 laptop display.

DeltaLima 🐧 » 🌐 2026-02-16 / 2026-02-16
@DeltaLima@social.la10cy.net

Mhhh.. #snac crashes when it start's in my Dual Pentium II system. It's performing at start a heavy job "started deferred data integrity check", which does lot IO.
When I turn off the traffic from outside, it seems to run (takes ages). But when I turn on the traffic to it, it crashes with
`Illegal instruction (core dumped)`

I took the installation over from the PIII system and activated the MP #OpenBSD kernel. (Do you really have to cp it from the CD by yourself??)

#retrocomputing #retroserver

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Fritz Adalis [he/him] » 🌐 2026-02-16
@FritzAdalis@infosec.exchange

@DeltaLima
Recent versions of OpenBSD automatically install the right kernel. Are you running a fairly recent version?

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DeltaLima 🐧 » 🌐 2026-02-16
@DeltaLima@social.la10cy.net

@FritzAdalis 7.8 downloaded the iso two weeks ago.
I took the SSD over from an P III single core system, where I installed it. I thought OpenBSD should be capable as well to get swapped around similar hardware.

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Fritz Adalis [he/him] » 🌐 2026-02-16
@FritzAdalis@infosec.exchange

@DeltaLima
Usually it can. I'm not sure of the technical reasons for having single vs. multi processor kernels any more, but they should at least boot.

(I guess I read what you wrote backwards from what you meant.)

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DeltaLima 🐧 » 🌐 2026-02-16
@DeltaLima@social.la10cy.net

@FritzAdalis I've tried the "normal" bsd kernel without mp support again, and it crashes there too :/
Looks like I have to do some more debugging.

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Fritz Adalis [he/him] » 🌐 2026-02-16
@FritzAdalis@infosec.exchange

@DeltaLima
Yeah, it shouldn't crash. Maybe try ktrace/kdump on it and see where it dies, or gdb on the core file if you know how to use it. (I do not.)

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DeltaLima 🐧 » 🌐 2026-02-17
@DeltaLima@social.la10cy.net

@FritzAdalis I tried ktrace+kdump but didnt get something out of it. At the end, it gets a SIGILL, after trying to read a json file. I then did a dump with tracing all childs and saw it seemed to read a lot of certificates - so I assume it's doing some SSL stuff and fails there (?) 🤷
```
19370 snac PSIG SIGILL SIG_DFL code=ILL_PRVOPC addr=0xa0284f0 trapno=0
19370 snac STRU struct stat { dev=10, ino=2728365, mode=-rw-r----- , nlink=2, uid=1001<"snac">, gid=0<"wheel">, rdev=109...
```

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Fritz Adalis [he/him] » 🌐 2026-02-17
@FritzAdalis@infosec.exchange

@DeltaLima
Ssl... I wonder if it's expecting the cpu to have an instruction that didn't exist then.

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DeltaLima 🐧 » 🌐 2026-02-17
@DeltaLima@social.la10cy.net

@FritzAdalis Idk - @ltning is running two servers on similar machines, one with AMD 5x86 and one with dual Pentium on NetBSD. He's also running a patched version, but from what I understood (C programming noob) there was nothing directly ssl related in those commits.
I'll try this fork next just for fun.

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Ltning » 🌐 2026-02-17
@ltning@weirdr.net

@DeltaLima@social.la10cy.net @FritzAdalis@infosec.exchange I'm currently running the regular version - but on NetBSD, not OpenBSD. Are you building it yourself? Is it possible it links to some system library that is compiled with SSE? But it looks like the SIGILL is in the stat system call which is weird? Or am I misreading that?

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Fritz Adalis [he/him] » 🌐 2026-02-17
@FritzAdalis@infosec.exchange

@ltning @DeltaLima
The man pages say sigill is 'illegal instruction' which is why I thought of the sse/simd additions. It could just be trying to execute garbage though.

DeltaLima 🐧 » 🌐 2026-02-17
@DeltaLima@social.la10cy.net

@ltning @FritzAdalis Yes I'm building it as described in the README.md . Yea SSE could be an interesting reason for that. But the rest of the system works just fine with all the ssl stuff (curl https://, ssh, ..)
I am really new to BSD world, ktrace looks kinda familiar, but I havent got really into it yet. I uploaded a bit more context to it if youre interested: https://privatebin.net/?e08420adeed29c66#42FxjSdb2KYqUyhNFEGW7Ty1rC3XoxgDPjvNMYb7RAo4

Fritz Adalis [he/him] » 🌐 2026-02-17
@FritzAdalis@infosec.exchange

@DeltaLima @ltning
Hm, Pentium and 5x86 wouldn't have any instructions that a PII doesn't. Could be something that was ripped out of libressl but netbsd is I think still on openssl. Or I'm completely off base and it's just a regular bug.

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Ltning » 🌐 2026-02-17
@ltning@weirdr.net

Yeah, but if the binary was built on the PIII, then it will not work on the PII assuming the compiler uses "current machine" as default target..

CC: @DeltaLima@social.la10cy.net

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Fritz Adalis [he/him] » 🌐 2026-02-17
@FritzAdalis@infosec.exchange

@ltning @DeltaLima
OpenBSD source will always output the same code independent of the current cpu capabilities, but other code may not.

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DeltaLima 🐧 » 🌐 2026-02-17 / 2026-02-17
@DeltaLima@social.la10cy.net

@FritzAdalis @ltning I think I'll try NetBSD next as troubleshooting step, hope I will find time at the weekend for it. Thank you so far! :)

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Ltning » 🌐 2026-02-17
@ltning@weirdr.net

NetBSD is likely to be a fair bit faster than OpenBSD - especially on such old hardware, where most of the various CPU vulnerability mitigations are useless but OpenBSD enables them anyway. T(h)rashing of caches and pipelines for no good reason makes for a suboptimal experience.

You may want to make sure you disable encrypted swap unless you have a ton of RAM. Someone seems to think that if you're on x86 you always have CPU to spare for encryption :D

Also, pkgin is fantastic and many (more than on OpenBSD) packages are built so they work on even an i486.

CC: @FritzAdalis@infosec.exchange

DeltaLima 🐧 » 🌐 2026-02-17 / 2026-02-17
@DeltaLima@social.la10cy.net

@ltning no, I built it new from scratch. I also reinstalled the whole system today to ensure everything is fine.

ltning » 🌐 2026-02-17
@ltning@larry.weirdr.net

The 5x86 says hi .. and enjoys the attention ;)

CC: @FritzAdalis@infosec.exchange @ltning@weirdr.net

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DeltaLima 🐧 » 🌐 2026-02-17
@DeltaLima@social.la10cy.net

@ltning@larry.weirdr.net @FritzAdalis @ltning@weirdr.net 👋

1 ★ 0 ↺

Ltning » 🌐 2025-10-22
@ltning@weirdr.net

Been asked to post pics of this PPro/PIIOverDrive rig. Couple of shitty pics here; let me know if anyone wants actual details. :) Too tipsy to provide much right now..

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Picture of the CPU board, with two Pentium II OverDrive CPUs with retrofitted Noctua fans (for the noise..). Some cabling for the CF card, and more spaghetti for power, fans, etc.

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Picture of the other side of the CPU board, showing half of the system RAM (512MB in total), a SCSI controller, NIC, USB, VGA, SATA and Gravis Ultrasound and Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold cards.

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Ltning » 🌐 2025-10-22
@ltning@weirdr.net

And for the sake of completeness, my desktop while it's busy posting the above post to the rest of the Fediverse. Luckily I got a shot before my CPU monitor had removed all her textiles... #nsfw

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An actual picture of a screen showing NetBSD with HexChat, a couple of log tailers on the root window, a messy background image, WindowMaker window manager, and the Hot Babe CPU monitor busy getting undressed next to GKrellM explaining why. And a couple of (remote) ungoogled-chromium windows.

4 ★ 1 ↺

Anders Gulden Olstad boosted

Ltning » 🌐 2025-10-22
@ltning@weirdr.net

And since nobody asked: The Office.

#Office #Work #NoWork

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Picture of (part of) my office. Left-to-right: A 486-50 running OS/2+Novell Netware, a 486DLC, a 486DX4, a somethingorother, a dual Pentium Pro. Above, a cabinet with LED-lit retrocomputing components and games.

0 ★ 0 ↺

in reply to »

Ltning » 🌐 2025-09-09
@ltning@weirdr.net

Hey there :) Trust me, I know testing ISA cards in PCI machines is "wrong". And that there are many reasons for this, but the bridges you mention are not, in themselves, the problem. I'd like to say "not all bridges are created alike", and also that the direct cpu-to-ISA thing has not been true since the 286 era. From anything 386 onwards there has always been a bridge of some kind involved. So yes, it's "wrong", but only in the sense that "there's a PCI bus here, wtf am I punishing myself with an ISA VGA?!?".

ISA performance can be "as good as it gets" on a PCI machine, and most BIOSes will allow you to configure it to a point that it can easily saturate the bus and even break stuff - just like in the good old days. Wait states and bus speed tuning being the most important things.

I also know that Tridents are not all garbage, but it is fair to say that the 9000-series (which is essentially a 8900C with some additional integration) isn't going to win any performance prizes no matter what machine you put it in. The 8900D on the other hand is quite impressive in DOS, keeping up with all but a small handful of much more expensive cards. It is, of course, useless for a GUI system since it has no acceleration functions, but for plain VGA it's pretty good.

All that said, I have not made any attempt at tuning for speed in these tests, and as I'm sure came across in my post - this is a highly un-scientific test that is only meant to gauge the relative difference between those cards (and with room for failure even at that). Fact of the matter, and what I wanted to confirm, is that the Matrox is unbelievably slow; I'm fairly sure the original VGA implementation with discrete chips (rather than a "VGA chip") would've performed better. Hell, even UniVBE warns me when configuring it that the card is unbearably slow in DOS, and doesn't even expose more than 1MB in VGA mode, so I should not expect much from it. Well, I guess I confirmed that, at least. :D

The reason is, of course, that the Matrox is made for GUI applications. And in those, compared to its peers, it absolutely shines according to reviews at the time. I'm looking forward to testing it in a GUI environment, and I'll surely post about that somewhere as well. And I'll use more period-correct hardware, I promise! :)

5 ★ 3 ↺

Ltning » 🌐 2025-09-07 / 2025-09-21
@ltning@weirdr.net

Welcome to my mini ISA VGA shootout!
TL;DR: ISA Matrox cards are really, really slow in DOS.

I recently built an original Pentium 60MHz system, built on an ECS motherboard. Around the same time I received a "mystery" VGA card: A Matrox MGA Impression ISA card. And since most of my builds are "open builds" and therefore easily accessible, that machine got the pleasure of becoming the test bench for the Matrox.

As already revealed, the Matrox performs atrociously bad. So bad, in fact, that I had to test a couple other ISA cards to make sure it wasn't a system issue. I used my go-to benchmarking tool #3DBench from Phil's DOS Benchmark Pack. I really don't want to experience Doom with this card..

And without further ado, the contestants and their results in this spur-of-the-moment benchmark run:
- Baseline: A 32-bit PCI S3 Virge/DX based card with 4MB RAM: A perfectly workable 48.2
- The low-end Trident TVGA9000C with 512KB RAM (this is a real garbage card): A pretty shitty 14.2
- The mid-range Cirrus Logic CL-GD-5422 with 1MB RAM (this is a decent card, known for compatibility but not necessarily speed): A barely bearable 24.7
- And finally, the "star" of the show, the Matrox: A whopping 10.9!

I said it was atrocious, didn't I? But hey, I'm gonna use this one with #OS2 anyway, so who cares about DOS performance, right? ;)

#RetroComputing #Benchmarks #VGA #SlowVGA

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Montage: Close-up of the S3 card installed in the system, next to picture of the 3DBench result

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Montage: Picture of the Trident (a small ISA card) next to picture of the 3DBench result

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Montage: Picture of the Cirrus Logic (small ISA card) next to picture of the 3DBench result

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Montage: Picture of the Matrox (a very large full-length ISA card) next to picture of the 3DBench result

6 ★ 1 ↺

Ltning » 🌐 2025-09-08
@ltning@weirdr.net

Welcome to my mini ISA VGA shootout!
TL;DR: ISA Matrox cards are really, really slow in DOS.

And without further ado, the contestants and their results in this spur-of-the-moment benchmark run:
- Baseline: A 32-bit PCI S3 Virge/DX based card with 4MB RAM: A perfectly workable 48.2
- The low-end Trident TVGA9000C with 512KB RAM (this is a real garbage card): A pretty shitty 14.2
- The mid-range Cirrus Logic CL-GD-5422 with 1MB RAM (this is a decent card, know for compatibility but not necessarily speed): A barely bearable 24.7
- And finally, the "star" of the show, the Matrox: A whopping 10.9!

I said it was atrocious, didn't I? But hey, I'm gonna use this one with #OS2 anyway, so who cares about DOS performance, right? ;)

#RetroComputing #Benchmarks #VGA #SlowVGA

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Montage: Close-up of the S3 card installed in the system, next to picture of the 3DBench result

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Montage: Picture of the Trident (a small ISA card) next to picture of the 3DBench result

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Montage: Picture of the Cirrus Logic (small ISA card) next to picture of the 3DBench result

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Montage: Picture of the Matrox (a very large full-length ISA card) next to picture of the 3DBench result

3 ★ 0 ↺

in reply to »

Ltning » 🌐 2025-09-02
@ltning@weirdr.net

Is ssh2dos anywhere near usable these days, without running decades-old opensshd on the server end? :D

1 ★ 0 ↺

in reply to »

Ltning » 🌐 2025-09-02
@ltning@weirdr.net

Yea sorry, I thought that was the "old" code. I was thinking EC crypto, since that's much, much faster on slow hardware. It surprised me a bit when I started experimenting, but given the much shorter keys it actually makes some sense.
See https://git.anduin.net/ltning/sshbench - I have not tested on anything slower than a crappy 486 (because no modern BSD will work on any of them) but EC ciphers generally come out on top every time - by a huge margin, too.

7 ★ 2 ↺

Pun Boleh boosted

Ltning » 🌐 2025-07-22
@ltning@weirdr.net

Was wondering why my #OS/2 installation kept crashing randomly.

Also, testing hashtags on snac ;)
#OS2 #WarpServer #Memtest

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Memtest86 5.01 reporting loads of memory errors. Yay.

4 ★ 1 ↺

retrogaming_bot boosted

Ltning » 🌐 2025-07-18
@ltning@weirdr.net

#DOS #MP3 player UI shootout! An AMD Am5x86 at 120MHz with a Gravis Ultrasound PnP playing back a VBR (~254Kbps) 44.1KHz MP3 file at full quality.

The contenders: QuickView Pro version (dvpro), Digital Sound System 3.1 (dss) and MPXPlay 1.67 (mpx). The file: Astral Projection's "Bizarre Contact" from the album "Ten".

Enjoy these clips :D

#Retrocomputing #VacationInMyHead #Multimedia

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QuickView Pro: file listing in the background and a simple status dialog in the foreground showing file information and the playback time.

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MPXPlay: File/directory browser below (mostly removed from the video), spectrum analyzer and various playback information on top.

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DSS: VU meters for left/right and playback information along with a lot of information about the file and the sound device.

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DSS: Spectrum analyzer, plus technical information as in the other video.

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Ltning » 🌐 2025-07-17
@ltning@weirdr.net

Ugh. After spending three days trying to compile TUI clients for Telegram and Discord on this thing I'm giving up. The whole Rust ecosystem is just as broken and unfriendly as most everything that came before it, with upwards of 700 dependencies to build just about anything, obscure build errors and a build process that literally takes days on this - admittedly very old - hardware. It's no longer fun. :P

3 ★ 1 ↺

Pun Boleh boosted

in reply to »

Ltning » 🌐 2025-07-11
@ltning@weirdr.net

In fairness, if there is such a thing which can exuse this travesty: this is an OS released in 1994, with a browser that came along in 1996, a Java version (1.1) from 1997 and a TCP/IP package from 1998 or so. Of course all this would have been easier had I been using OS/2 Warp 4, but that one is just a tad too resource hungry on this hardware. :D

9 ★ 4 ↺

retrogaming_bot boosted

Ltning » 🌐 2025-07-10
@ltning@weirdr.net

Despite all the things IBM did right with OS/2, there were some absolutely mind-boggling decisions made. Today's example: Using Java (version 1.11 or better, mind you) and a Netscape browser plug-in to install TCP/IP. Other than the chicken-and-egg-problem (which is solved by installing the transport services - NIC and protocol drivers - first), there's the fact that they had a perfectly good software installation framework which ran fine on like 6-8MB of RAM (total!). This variant swaps until my CF card starts sweating with 16MB, and is s-l-o-w!

I mean yeah, great, I get a proper BSD-4.4, 32-bit TCP/IP stack and tools. But it's taken me half a day. Getting the installation files over involved loading packet drivers and using #mTCP in a DOS session. Which works .. surprisingly well. But still .. FixPak43, reboot. MPTS, reboot. Netscape 2.02, reboot. Java 1.18, reboot. Feature Installer plug-in (no reboot). Then, finally, TCP/IP.

All this to have a machine to play with at #Blackvalley.

#OS2 #Retrocomputing #WhyAreYouReadingThis #GoDoSomethingUseful

0 ★ 0 ↺

in reply to »

Ltning » 🌐 2025-07-01
@ltning@weirdr.net

Make them pay!

1 ★ 0 ↺

in reply to »

Ltning » 🌐 2025-07-01
@ltning@weirdr.net

http://floppy.museum/ :D (Note http, not https)

1 ★ 0 ↺

Ltning » 🌐 2025-06-30
@ltning@weirdr.net

It's fun to run #snac servers on old, slow computers. Posts that showed up on my big fat #pleroma server a couple hours ago are only showing up now, simply because it's too busy to receive all relevant notifications at once. Other instances seem to be backing off for a while, and try again at random intervals so the load on this box remains low. Pretty cool, assuming that's actually how it works!

Only when a post is boosted or replied to do I run the risk of my hot-babe CPU monitor turning nsfw. So better keep it boring, I guess.

1 ★ 1 ↺

in reply to »

Ltning » 🌐 2025-06-28
@ltning@weirdr.net

I have a #snac server running under NetBSD on a 486, which also runs X. It's indeed painfully slow but it does work. And surprisingly well, too. An OS from 2025 on hardware from 1994.

And if it wasn't for crypto being too slow to actually work I'd be doing the same on the 386SX-class machine that I also have running NetBSD. But with a hyper-optimized SSH handshake taking over a minute, I have no hopes for 2k RSA signatures or any kind of TLS handshakes with remote instances happening in anywhere near the timeframe they would need to..

0 ★ 0 ↺

in reply to »

Ltning » 🌐 2025-06-28
@ltning@weirdr.net

I'd like to say that is an achievement no matter what your first language is ;)

CC: @linuxenjoyer@blahaj.zone

1 ★ 0 ↺

in reply to »

Ltning » 🌐 2025-06-27
@ltning@weirdr.net

Reminds me of all those times we were hiring sysadmins for our "hosting organization". And the majority of applicants came from the hospitality industry, despite our ads very clearly using words like FreeBSD and MySQL and titles like Command Line Warrior and stuff..