"Roger E. Rustad, Jr" <[email protected]> wrote:

> Ok, I must have missed something.  You're missing a PTR record

Nope, all the appropriate PTR records are there all right.  At first I
thought the reverse DNS problem was due to BIND fubaredness (sometimes
it gets into some kind of wedged state in which it replies with an error
to all queries until it spontaneously exits the wedged state), but with
Jeff Lasman's help I have diagnosed it to be a problem at the Tier 1 ISP
from which we get our /24 static IP netblock - a trouble ticket has been
opened with the ISP.

"Vasta, Stephen" <[email protected]> wrote:

> I haven't seen a VAX since the early '90s (they were obsolete then, but
> at least they were good at keeping the room warm).

They are still very good at that - our machine room has special power
and air conditioning like any real machine room ought to.

> Why run 4.3BSD on a
> VAX when VMS works so much better?

Actually no, our VAXen aren't vanilla DEC VAXen, they are special hacked
VAXen (HAXen?) built by Harhan Engineering Co. and they have specifically
been built to run 4.3BSD-Quasijarus, not VMS.

> Running 4.3BSD on a VAX back then
> was like trying to run Windows XP on MAC hardware now . . .  :-)

Not the case here.  Ours is a modified version of 4.3BSD called
4.3BSD-Quasijarus (named after an alien starsystem in my favourite
Russian sci-fi epic) maintained by Harhan Engineering Co., and because
it runs on the special HAXen also built by Harhan Engineering Co., they
fit like hand in glove.

Also I did not start out by acquiring a VAX and then shopping around for
an OS to run on it, instead it was the other way around.  When I started
Harhan Project in 1997, I had asked myself the question of what is/was
the most "true and pure" version of UNIX according to my highly
subjective taste, and the answer I came up with was 4.3BSD.  So I then
gave myself the goal of running 4.3BSD on whatever hardware platform is
called for, and when I determined that the optimal hardware platform was
a specially-tailored VAX, I had built a few of those after learning the
fundamentals of VAX hardware and acquiring all the necessary parts.

Since the goal of the whole exercise was and is to run 4.3BSD, other
operating systems that happen to be capable of running on the same
hardware (such as VMS or NetBSD or even Linux/VAX) simply hold no
interest for me.

MS

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