Yet another Hacker News

A restored PDP-11/83 serving this page on 211BSD Unix

18 points davepl 1 hour ago 4 comments

davepl 1 hour ago | parent

The box is a restored Q-bus PDP-11/83 named minerva: Mentec M11 CPU, two chassis tied with M9404/M9405, RQDX3, 2xEmulex UC07, KDA50, RLV12, DEQNA, M3104. Storage is RA82 + dual RA92, MFM boot/swap, dual RL02, RX50s, and a TKZ50. OS is 2.11BSD.

The live panel is top. /cgi-bin/webtop is the raw snapshot.

A 16-bit httpd will not survive the front page, so Varnish/Caddy/Cloudflare cache the HTML and a 5-second webtop sample. Origin is still the 11 itself, and it handles all of the webtop and visitor count requests.

Telnet exists (pdp1173.com, guest) but it is a 40-year-old UNIX with no modern security story. Please do not treat it as a challenge box; I can restore from tape, but that ruins it for everyone else.

Happy to answer Mentec, MSCP, Q-bus, or 2.11BSD questions.

To get BSD running on the Mentec, I had to customize the BSD kernel to use FPSIM, as the Mentec supports IEEE floating-point and NOT the DEC formats.

kjs3 23 minutes ago | parent

Please do not treat it as a challenge box; I can restore from tape, but that ruins it for everyone else.

Unfortunately, for a disturbing percentage of the Internet, ruining things for everyone else is the goal. I'd turn off telnet.

budman1 9 minutes ago | parent

as of 12 noon CST, it pings but does not telnet.

mlmonkey 12 minutes ago | parent

Why is the domain `pdp1173.com` when the machine is a PDP 11/83 ?