Modem Emulation - an RC2018/09 prologue

Most of you will know by now that I'm really into preserving the memory of Prestel and Viewdata systems generally.  I run www.viewdata.org.uk which, while a bit long in the tooth, is going to get a massive update "soon" ...   But today I'm going to talk about hardware.

Some time back, I fired up my old viewdata BBS "Ringworld" - this operated on a collection of BBC Micros - one per connected user - and an Acorn A5000 acting as fileserver.  I connected these to the internet using a motly selection of modems, ATA telephony adapters, and serial terminal adapters.

The long shot was, for a user dialling in, the call was answered either by the exact same modem it always had been, connected to a SIP ATA - the digital data was transformed to analogue, before being turned back to digital by the modem.  This always seemed like a poor idea to me. What would be better is if some bit of software answered that digitised telephone call, looked at the whistles and warbles, and turned it directly into a sequence of ASCII bytes for delivery to a telnet port.

I had found an program called iaxmodem that allowed an asterisk based PBX to emulate a modem, but it was focused on faxing, and I just couldn't get it to work with the V23 dial-up I wanted.  But it was close.   I spent the next few years, off and on, searching for changes to that, or SIP based alternatives, with no luck.

In the meantime, John Newcombe decided to write his own viewdata host service, called Telstar, in Python, and that can be accessed via a raw-socket. (like telnet, but without the features!)  There's not a lot of software out there that can talk both Viewdata display protocols and connect to a socket, however.  Richard Russell wrote a example viewdata client that could do it, and you can connect from BeebEm if you load up a suitable comms package and set the RS423 IP parameters. 

There have also been a couple of projects to produce a "WiFi Modem" that, basically, looks like a hayes-compatible modem that you connect to via RS232, but it in turn connects to your WiFi, and onwards to a telnet port out on the internet.  This is great for things like BBC Micros, Commodore 64s, etc., where you can just swap out your period modem for this new device.   Not so good for dedicated terminals, or e.g. the ZX Spectrum VTX5000 where the modems are built in.

Then, out of the blue, an old friend, Darren Storer, posted on the BBC Micro facebook group (I think it was there..) that he'd set up a dial-up number for Telstar, and could people test it.  It took me a week or two to get there, but I pulled out a terminal, dialled the number ... and it didn't work.  Not at all.  I did, however find out the software he was using ...  asterisk-Softmodem.  This was exactly the sort of project I'd been looking for all those years.  But, it didn't work for him/

I pulled the code and had a look, and could see nothing wrong.  So, firing up an asterisk server, and installing it, I tried to debug.  The first issue was my terminal was not locking onto the carrier, so I added a t(-10) to increase the volume, and that sorted that!

Next problem, I wasn't getting much data on screen - many characters were just missing!   This was somewhat easy to diagnose, as I had an inkling after seeing how you configured asterisk to use softmodem - you specified the number of data bits, being between 5 and 8.  The example had it as 8. Now Prestel, and of course the terminals, all used 7 bits with even parity. What I was seeing was the terminal being sent 8-bit data, and of course interpreting that as most of the characters having an incorrect parity bit, and ignoring those!

Now, I can set a software terminal to 8bit data, but not the termnal - there  is very little you can configure as a user on these things.  Because the project had no support for parity it looked like a dead end, but that wasn't going to stop me - I'd waited years to find this, and wasn't going to give up now!

Delving into the code, it actually turned out to be a nice simple and straightforward bit of programming.  Adding parity support turned out to be fairly easy... I've published the modifications to my own github fork and submitted a pull request to send them back to the original author.

So now, I can dial into Telstar, CCL4, or anywhere I want to set up a number for!

If you want to try it, the number for Telstar is 0333 340 3311 (from outside UK, +44 333 340 3311). Calls cost the same as an 01 or 02 and are included in any inclusive minutes you may have. Call s are free for A&A customers.)

I can't guarantee that number will stay up, and it may not work from time to time if I'm tweaking things, but if it turns out useful to you, please let me know in the comments below!

Home console for Total Television

Home Console for total television?

Our cover picture, this issue, demonstrates that home electronics of the future need not be stark and futuristic. It is the first actual physical representation of how television and sound of the future might well look in the sitting room of the relatively near future.

This two-part furniture-treatment in glowing rosewood, was presented for the first time ever by TV science pundit James Burke at a Radio Industries gathering in London on the eve of the start of his recent BBC series "Connections", in which he took an idiosyncratic look at the ways TV might be used in the future. The "home video and computer console" as it was described, has been produced by the Thorn Group under its Ferguson brand, to present how it thinks such a console to cover known and expected advances in home electronics might be developed.

The two modules, moving easily on castors, can be brought together as a unit of furniture, or separated for use individually in different parts of a room.

Lest this should be thought an idle flight of fancy, it should be recorded that a 180-page report from the USA has stated that what it calls IVTs (integrated video terminals) will emerge within the next four years. The report predicts that IVTs will be a billion-dollar industry within ten years. It even puts a price of $1400 (£700 or so) on such units in 1982. 

With typical transatlantic zest for new word pictures, the report (from International Resource Development Inc) says the expected strong consumer demand for interactive TV services will lead to the concept of "narrowcasting" as opposed to broadcasting.

The IVT is seen as being the primary home tool for: entertainment, publishing access, home environment scheduling, home admin (payment of bills etc), domestic appliance control, self education and correspondence via electronic mail services.

International Resource Development Inc put Japan ahead when it reported originally, in August last. But it said that the US had a "major opportunity for innovative breakthrough" for the second generation of IVTs.

The report sees the terminals selling through retail outlets initially, but as it "assumes a greater and greater role in the control of other appliances and as the centre of home life, education and correspondence as well as entertainment", it would become more like the motor car in marketing, with specialised dealer outlets.

It sees manufacture moving eventually away from the present home computer manufacturers, and possibly from the present TV makers too, to the "vertically integrated companies with solid-state computer and consumer manufacturing and sales experience"—companies like Texas Instruments and IBM are named as "likely candidates".

Key to the controls -

Starting from the left, the units contain: 

1 A display panel for digital time and  programme selection by LCD (liquid crystal display).

2 Drawer one, with removable remote control for TV programmes, teletext and viewdata operation. Also a
"vote "button by which, if cable TV is established, immediate response to questions asked in a TV studio can be accurately measured. This is already on test in the US.
3 Drawer two, a home video system — the all-electronic operation reduces the size from today's bulkier models.
4 Drawer three, has a floppy disc unit — computer memory store for instant information retrieval.
5 Drawer four, a stereo audio cassette unit with all-electronic function controls. Cassettes can also store
viewdata or other pulse-coded information.
6 A telephone handset moulded to match the cabinet. To be replaced, when available, by a videophone instrument.
7 Drawer five, a keyboard for home computer programming, advanced video games and viewdata messages, plus a print-out facility for messages or processed information.
8 A retractable small screen monitor for checking incoming or outgoing information to be processed by other elements of the console.

And, of course, the large wall-screen with monitor screens for showing other programmes, viewdata and teletext messages, or even pictures from in-house closed-circuit cameras for security or domestic needs.

First published in Viewdata and TV user, January 1979.

(Just think; you could do all that today on a mobile phone! Maybe I should do an emulator..)

The Xoom Saga

Back towards the beginning of the year, I purchased my good lady wife a new tablet computer.  She'd been using a cheapie 7" one for a while, but it was not very well supported, on an old version of Android, and a little heavy.  But it was cheap, and it worked, and I hadn't wanted to spend too much because we've a house full of gadgets that get played with just once...

Anyway, the cheap tablet was a success, so come birthday time, I bought her a new one.  After reading around, and doing the whole budget versus features thing, opted for a Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition.  Slightly bigger screen, but thinner and lighter, and much more responsive.  It cost me about £330 via Amazon (yes I did shop around, that was the best I could find it at the tieme) and she loved it.

Three months down the line, though, a slight reluctance to charge properly had turned into a complete refusal.  If you held the cable just so you could get the charge light on, but it didn't seem to actually take it. Obviously it was faulty, and presumably something loose around the usb/charging socket, despite us taking care with it all the time - I've come across enough laptops with damaged power connectors to ensure we're careful on that score.

So I tried talking to the original seller.  They told me to send it to Motorola under guarantee, which I did. They just sent it back with a rather vague "internal damage, outside warranty" report.  When I called them they were equally vague, said it must mean it would cost more to repair than it was worth.  Now we didn't damage it, so it must have arrived like that, but the seller wasn't having any of it.   Despite having the Sale of Goods act on my side, they blanket refused to do anything.  Amazon weren't any help either; the seller had already stopped selling anything through them, so I suspect that there was little they could do anyway.

I'm still considering going through the credit card company, or maybe a small claims against the seller, but it's all my word against theirs it seems. At worst, I could claim it on the house insurance, but there's a £100 excess on that!

In the meantime, I'm stuck with a dead tablet and a frustrated wife - going back to the old tablet was pretty hard work by now, and despite the cost coming down, it'd still be over £200 to buy an identical replacement...   so, who you gonna call?.  ACR Limited, in Heywood.  No simple board-swappers this lot, they actually fix things like proper engineers should!  My last employer used them for laptop repairs, and I'd had them look at a laptop of mine last year (it was too far gone, so they didn't charge me anything) so thought I'd let them look at this.  Despite never having seen one before, they managed to find the parts to fix it, and it cost me less than the insurance excess and substantially less than buying a replacement.

So, this post is really just to recommend them for if you have anything computer related that's broken, not just laptops!

Retrochallenge: Starting position..

The Attic

Well here we are.  My starting position at getting the viewdata BBS sorted out..

Top shelf - misc DIY stuff, but there's a spare electron shoved in there.

Middle shelf - two VoIP adapters & firewall, elderly modem rack, two terminal servers running off old PC power supplies since theirs died, and a NAS box and external USB drives that is nothing to do with this!

Bottom shelf - ancient mono monitor, three BBC Micros, two magic modems, quad-video switch.

On the floor: various spare beebs and ARM machines....

On the right, another two beebs, a Tandata viewdata adapter sat in a touchscreen for a CUB, atop a portable TV, and lots of more stuff!

At present, in use: one VoIP box adapter, the magic modems, and two beebs.

Out of shot is an Acorn A5000 which runs the econet fileserver and a RISC PC, sharing an old 14" monitor.

Previously, I did have two beebs on modems and two beebs connected to one of the terminal servers accepting calls from the internet, allowing four users but only two by each method.  The aim is to use the modem rack and terminal servers to answer the phones, with as many beebs as I can get working connected to other ports on the terminal servers. This will disassociate the link between access method and bbc micro, and allow more people to use the system.  Should they want to.  

At the moment I'm lucky to find even one person visiting ....

Anyway, I'm hoping I'll be able to tidy this lot up as well as getting it working again!  As you can see, it'll need it!

Raspberry Pi - a comparatative unboxing.

Back in the mists of time, I woke up early in order to view the important announcement on the Raspberry Pi website, widely known to be their starting to take orders.  It seems I was not the only one to do this.  Their website held up, but the websites of their two chosen distributors collapsed almost immediately.

I did manage to get to an "express your interest" page on RS Components website, which I filled in.  It took until much later in the day to get on the Farnell site, where I managed to actually order two units.

Some days later, Farnell reduced the order quantity to one, and admitted they didn't have stock.

Eventually, on 4th May, RS mailed me, and I ordered a board from there.  It arrived on 9th May!

Farnell sent mine on 12th June..  Take off ten days due to a hiccup with the card I used, but still...some difference, especially as they had a confirmed order from the start!

Anyway, here's a side-by-side unboxing! There are some differences.

RS on the left, Farnell on the Right,

The obvious one is the thickness of the envelope - the farnell one was shoved through the letterbox!

This is why - they are using different size boxes! Farnell's is about the size of a pack of playing cards..

Nice security seals!

Ah, now we see why.  Lots of nice protective foam from RS.  Absolutely nothing from Farnell..

But they look pretty much the same inside.

Very subtle differences, though.  Extra print on the left hand side on RS's board.
A closer look.  You'll notice this has moved to the bottom (top right as shown) on Farnell's board.

and underneath...
You might just be able to see, the RS unit's CE marking is on a sticker, Farnell's is printed.

Now to play .... I quite like the idea of a Vax Cluster using them, but I might end up using at least one for XBMC/OpenELEC.   The other should, I hope, get some use teaching Tiddler some programming!

Fun with terminals

Christmas bought me a little present -

It's a HOBS branded, Philips NMS 6302 viewdata terminal. Very dinky and sweet, and working perfectly! This is a pretty late model, built in 1990, compared to most of my other terminals. It says "Made in France" on the bottom, mentions Minitel, and therefore supports Teletel, Teletel Pad X3 and ASCII services too! Pity it's monochrome.. This would however be really cute to have on my desk, were I a high powered executive working in the 1990s...

As you might be able to tell, it's currently viewing the main Prestel Messaging index, page 7a. This is courtesy of my viewdata BBS, which it has given me a bit of incentive to try and get back online. (It's very very flakey at the moment but if you fancy tying it out, there's a single line sometimes-working on 03333 403311.. Key *Prestel# to jump out of the BBS and back in time, at least for a moment... ) I'm intending to re-work this in time, using the better modems and terminal servers to allow internet access too. It is, however, a wonderful trip down memory lane seeing these pages trickling down at 1200bps again!

DNS

Just a quick warning, due to a hardware failure primary DNS is down for viewdata.org.uk, irrelevant.com and most of my domains. Secondary should continue serving though for the time being. This will affect ALL services, so if you can't access any of my websites, that's why. I will fix in the morning. I hope.

Edit 8am 2011-09-22. Wake up to find that DNS is still holding out, but my webhost has suspended the account for going over usage on disk space (on an unlimited account, go figure..)

Why it had to happen at the exact same moment, I don't know. Sod's law I guess!!

Edit 3pm 2011-09-22. DNS was back up this morning on temporary hardware. Hosting back online at 12 noon. Everything seems OK now. Thank you for your patience.

Writing a TiVo HDD

This is mainly a write up of my notes, for Alek, but thought they would be useful in public!

You will need a PC with a CD-ROM drive, a floppy drive and IDE hard drive connections.

Discs needed:

• Any bootable MS-DOS floppy with QUNLOCK program.


• MFSTools CD-ROM


• CD-ROM containing drive image


• Dylans Boot Floppy (optional)


• Floppy with network drivers on (optional)

Connect the CD-ROM as primary master.
Connect the new hard disc as secondary master.

Step 1 - unlock the drive

You only need to do this if when you boot up it the BIOS shows the drive as c. 9MB

Boot off the DOS floppy, F5 to skip autoexec etc.
A:>QUNLOCK 2

PHYSICALLY POWER OFF

Switch back on and check disk capacity is reported correctly.

Step 2 - Restore the image

Insert mfstools CDROM and reboot

Press CR as required to reach # prompt

Swap disc for CDROM containing your backup image

# mount /dev/hda /mnt/d
# mfstool restore -zi /mnt/d/tivo.bak /dev/hdc
(where tivo.bak is the filename of your backup image)

wait for it to complete.
# sync
and power off

Step 3 - Network drivers

Only if you need to install the drivers.
Remove any CDROMs and insert Dylans Boot Floppy
reboot
login: root
# mkdir /floppy
- insert tivonet setup disc
# mount /dev/fd0 /floppy
# /floppy/script
- wait
# sync
and power off

That should be it...

Down again..

Sigh. Just a quick note to let people know that The BBS is down at the moment, at least for Telnet access. The Beebs are still going fine, but the somewhat younger iolan+ terminal server has died. I think it's a PSU problem, as it makes a ticking noise with a matching pulsing power LED. Unfortunately, it's a built in PSU, so it's going to take some time to get round to diagnosing and fixing that.

Packard Bell Diamond 1200 plus scanner and Windows 7

Just a little post to help anybody else in the same situation.

I picked up this little scanner at a car boot sale at the weekend. It's an old one, only 600dpi as best I can tell, but it's small and light and USB powered, so handy to use quickly when sat on the sofa on the laptop, and when all I want to do is scan documents rather than photographs.

Packard bell's drivers, however, only work on XP or lower, and the laptop is on Windows 7; the disc I got with it refused to load, and windows couldn't find any drivers on it.

Much digging about on the internet however found a reference to somebody using an HP 1200 scanner driver, but that didn't work for me. Somebody else said it was a re-badged Mustek "BearPaw" scanner. Now that makes sense, given the layout of the buttons on it! Sure enough, the 2008 BearPaw 1200CU Plus drivers worked just fine! Indeed, windows actually told me that was what the scanner was, rather than my having to force it.

Result.

Aaarrggghhhh

It's rare that I find myself detesting a piece of software, but I'm sorry, I've got to the point where I now do. And what is the subject of my hate, you may ask? Why, it's Windows 7, and specifically the file Explorer.

In windows terms, I would probably be described as a power-user. I do a lot of work at file level - I prefer to use the file manager, see the files, and decide what I want to do with them there and then, usually using the right-click context menu and often the send-to options. To this end, I usually run explorer in "details" mode, with the folder list enabled, and most of the time I'm using the keyboard to move about in it!

Windows 7, however, has broken me. The folder list is, well, dreadful. No + and - boxes and lines linking folders. Just little triangles that come and go as they feel like it. Change the folder you have selected using the keyboard, and the list of files doesn't change. Not without pressing Enter or clicking. If I'm scanning down a long list of folders looking at the files, this doubles the keypresses, and more than doubles the time, as they are different keys!

And the damn breadcrumb thing in the address bar... what's that all about? I just want the path to the folder.

Oh, and a status bar that doesn't have anything useful in it - like spare space, total of file sizes, etc.

This is, by the way, on a new laptop. Which to add it's own brand of misery has a different keyboard layout to the old one. So I'm forever pressing End instead of Home, and Fn instead of Ctrl and turning the screen brightness down! .. sigh...


I've got Ubuntu installed in a VM. I might see how well I can work in there for a bit, and if I can cope, I will wipe this goddamn awful windows 7 and install an operating system fit for grown ups. Or XP at least.

(Originally posted at http://blog.irrelevant.com/2010/05/aaarrggghhhh.html)

The Ringworld BBS

We're getting closer to a fully working system. Well, I've less than a week before Acorn World when it's got to be on show!



Here you see three Beebs all up and running the host. I just need to find another plug for the second modem, but the first is up and running. It's a little untidy, sorry, but I've been busy building master battery packs !!

If anybody wants to try dialing in, the number is 0161 660 8192. 1200/75 V23 and viewdata mode ! I can't promise 24/7 availability, but it'll be up as much as I can until the show, then during it of course.

Telnet access details to follow ..

Finally!

Finally, after canablising and repairing motherboards of three dead A5000s I now have a working fileserver again! At last I can get on with the important tasks in life - getting set up to run a viewdata BBS up at the Acorn World show up in Huddersfield next month.

There will be intermittant access to it in the run up period; if anybody wants to re-live the glory days of being online in the 1980s, then watch this space for access details.

(And for those reading this on Facebook, click "view original post" below to get to the actual blog entry..)

Econet and furry batteries.

Firstly, I think I'm going to disable keyboard navigation on Opera, after yet again managing to press something that sent me forward or back a page and lost all I typed when I came back here. Let's try again.

OK, it's been a while since we had an update.

I've replaced my econet network cabling with some of PhilB's brand spanking new econet socket boxes. If you're into econet, then I really must recommend these. They link together with standard Cat5 fly-leads or cable, and have built in terminators where required.

That didn't help with my A5000 econet problems, however. Indeed, shortly afterwards the blasted thing wouldn't power up at all.

I put a plea out on comp.sys.acorn.misc and very soon have three offers of replacement machines. They really must be a nice bunch on there!

But a but of reading up has enlightened me to a standard problem with A5000s - Acorn, in their infinite wisdom, decided to solder Ni-Cad batteries directly onto the motherboard. You would have thought they would have learned their lesson with the exploding battery packs on the Masters. Anyway, after 15+ years, these batteries grow fur, and leak battery acid all over the place, wrecking tracks and burning the legs off chips..

So, with two replacement machines here, plus my original, I have three fury batteries, and none of the machines will work properly. I clean out Maplin of tagged Ni-cads (they don't have anything remotely pin compatible, so I'll have to solder them in on leads.) and rip out the batteries and clean up as best as I can the boards here. One looks like it's had it, with a fair bit of damage. The second required one track repair, and that is now firing up to the desktop. The third, my original machine, looks OK, but still won't power up. I'll have to get back to that.

Next task is, of course, to rebuild a whole machine. I'm going to use the SD-IDE drive I got from Mark at retroclinic, which is already formatted. I just need to work out how to copy disc-to-disc on a machine with only one IDE interface, as it is reluctant to co-exist with another drive.

I may have to set up another fileserver, fire up the A5000 with the hard drive, and copy everything off across the econet, then copy it all back again. Assuming the econet works now .....

Econet woes..

I've posted before about my problems getting the old-style Econet back up and running. I'm still having problems.

I'm also limited by the machines I have available to test things out with...

BUT so far, I've got the following working.

• Station 103, a Model B. This one one of the ones I obtained recently. Along with my 6502dvd second processor this is running a Level 2 fileserver.
  
• Station 101, a Model B, pretty vanilla. This is one of my original machines that ran the BBS 20 years ago.
  

Both of these are working fine, talking to each other quite hapilly.

And because I now have a known working pair of machines, I can now determine that...

• at least one of the cables I was using to test things with, doesn't work.
  
• the Master 128, station 40, I was running the fileserver on before will only occasionally see station 103, giving variouslly Net Jammed, Not Listening or Not Present errors.
  
• the A5000 still can't see anything, nor anything it. Since I swapped over the econet modules in this and Station 40, it looks like both may be dead.
  
• ..as might be a loose module I tried, which came loose in a box along with two others, one badly repaired, and a pile of chis... I don't like swaping them about in Stn 40, though, as it's under a replay board that I have to take out first.
  
• a Master 128 from the recent haul behaves exactly the same ...
  

So, I've got two Model Bs working, but nothing later. If I had at least one Master that was working 100%, then I could start swapping modules about to test them.

The only other econet-fitted machines are a Master with no battery pack (well, it DID have one, but it was a bit of a mess, and the keyboard has lots of dead keys anyway..) and a German Model B which has a dead PSU.

Time to drag out the other Masters that don't have econet fitted, see if I can get any of the modules working. After that, it's time to desolder the line drivers..

Sigh...

Rescued beebs!

Thanks to a lovely couple in Marple, I today collected a pile of ex-school equipment! Two Masters and a Model B were the least exciting bits - there were lots of software and manuals and documents about how the school econet had been set up. 5 seperate networks with at least three fileservers! I got two of the fileservers, but unfortunately no bridges.. also included, a pile of slightly rusty floppy drives, some with discs still in them, a Music 97, grafpad, light pens, some experiment boxes, and lots of spare chips ...

Anyway, photos are up on my nice new flikr account here.

Fustration 2

OK. Time for an update.

I connected the A5000, Model B and clock box all up with a known good T-piece and still they cannot talk to each other.

I swapped over the Econet modules in the Master downstairs and the A5000, which still didn't work.

I connected them all back up, using the new run of cable, etc. and fired up Level 2 fileserver on the Master, and the Model B can see it and logion!! Finally a result that tells me something - the Model B works, the Master works, the econet module in it is the one from the A5000, so presumably both of those work. And, the new cable run works! But the A5000 can't see the FS on the Master, and still neither can log into the L4 on the A5000. Drat.

So... it must be something in the A5000 that's causing me problems other than the econet module, which given the buffers on the module blow first if there is a line issue, means it most likely is a software problem.

Of course all this power cycling of the A5000 has thrown up more issues; the poor thing has two elderly hard discs in it, and the second one seems to be dying - I'm getting all sorts of strange transfer errors on power up, even before the "RISC OS / Acorn ADFS" banner appears. One thing after another ...

OK then, let's go solid state: I try to fit an SD-IDE adapter I got off Mark of retroclinic when we were at Byte Back and after some hunting for hform, got it formatting a 2GB SD memory card. But it keeps failing. A quick email to Mark and he reminds me that there's a 512MB limit on RISC OS 3.1 .. argh. I'd forgotten all about that one; used to hit it all the time with DOS machines way back when... (At least it didn't do what one client machine with a caching IDE controller did to me once - let me initialise a 1GB disc, and as we were copying data to it, as we hit the 512MB, looped back to the start of the drive and trashed the partition tables and directory...)

So, rather than limit the format and waste 75% of the 2GB card, I've found some 512MB mini-SD cards on eBay for 99p with free delivery, so ordered one of those. I've disabled the second IDE drive in the A5000 for now, as there wasn't anything on it I need at the moment, and I hope I can copy everything off it when I get the new card. I've got master/slave issues to work out on that yet ...

And then, once the A5000 is all up and running on the new drive, I can try and find out why it's not liking the econet any more..

Fustration

Don't you just hate it when things just will not work.

Some time back, I pondered running econet over 2 spare pairs in a cat5 cable that was already runinng ethernet from the ground floor to the atic.

After much discussion on the mailing list over the merits of running econet without the earth connection, I tried it, and it worked, and all was good. However, the Beeb was not really decorative enough to keep out, so has spent almost all the intervening time in the cupboard!

I finally made enough room in the spare room to get it set up on a desk there, but there was no direct cable from the atic where the filesever is to that room. After much swearing, I did manage to run another cable there, and duly crimped RJ45 sockets on the ends, and transferred the Econet DIN-Cat5 cables over. And it didn't work.

All I get on the Master is "Station 10 not present" drat. It's got a clock though...

So I try..

• Adding a crossover (by re-crimping one end) but that made it worse - didn't even see the clock...
  
• Visually checking all the connections at each end...
  
• Spending half an hour looking for the cat5 tester, then a little longer for a battery, just to confirm that the line is absolutely fine...
  
• Added the earth connections to the DINs, now I have enough wires to use...
  
• Set up a Model B in the attic, which also cannot see the server right next to it..
  
• Tried a new drop lead from the server to the econet sockets..
  
• Disconnected all the new cabling and brought the terminate upstairs, still no joy..
  
• Reset the econet station number on the server and tried another version of !Server..
  
• Power cycled the server several times doing all this..
  

And it still doesn't work..

All I lave left I am able to do is disconnect everything, link the B and the server and the clock together using T pieces and open up the server and re-seat the econet board.. it USED to work...

Sigh...

Miscellaneous Rants.

ok. I'm going to withdraw my custom from Sainsburys for the forseable future. I'm usually in there every day, for one thing or another, and spend about £150 a week!! But they peed me off last night. Closed the kiosk early, and lied about the time. That was just the last straw - there are loads of issues I have with them, but it was their "couldn't care less" attitude last night that was just too much for me. I've submitted a complaint to their careline, and we'll see if anything happens.

Two. I want to finish my work on BeebEm's AUN implementation. But Immediate operations and broadcasts aren't working. So I need to sniff some more network traffic between the real machines. Except the laptop I did it with last time won't stay on long enough to even boot without restarting.

Three. So I get back the laptop I lent out ages ago, and it comes back sans-PSU and with a completly dead hard disc, that looks like it might not even be the one I lent it out with. Brilliant. Not. Sacrifice the disc from an external drive to get the machine up and running, and reload Win2K. Now all I need are the drivers for the hardware. Which I had all nice and safe. On a seperate partition on the original hard disc. Argh. And it's an unbranded machine that I can't find diddly-squat about on the net, so it's gonna be an absolute pig to get sorted out. Just so I can use it for five minutes.. I might have to drag this one upstairs :-(

Four. Toddlers that wait exactly 25 minutes after you get to bed, just to make sure that you are actually asleep, before waking up and demanding milk...(actually, she's rather cute which more than makes up for this one..)

Five. Pets that seem to demand more and more care... What the hell am I supposed to do now the terrapins have gone and laid an egg in the corner of the tank?!

Six. Twitter. What's the hype?! Even XBMC now has a script to 'tweet' what you're watching at the time... I know what mine would say: Numberjacks, Bob the builder, Fimley the fire engine. See, it's not even me watching it most of the time..! (Thank goodness for the BBC iPlayer plugin!) Seriously, though, does anybody WANT to know what I'm doing from minute to minute each day - I don't know myself most of the time. I certainly don't have time to stop and tell the world..

Seven. Blog entries that ramble on about all sorts of crap.. oh, that's me. Drat.

It only took 20 years...

Back in the 1980s, the computer I used pretty much exclusively was the BBC Micro.  I had written a fair bit of software for it, including two products sold commercially, and a number of items I was commissioned to write.  I ran two dial-up bulletin boards and a moderated chatline/forum thing on Prestel. I was a committee member of ClubSpot 810, responsible for the BBS listings, and was employed by Micronet 800 in the Technical Help Department.

Most of what I did at home, including a multi-line viewdata bulletin board, was run from an "Econet" network I had at home.  Using a slightly modified BBC Master ET and a 10MB hard disc. (Yep, ten megabyte... I've got nearly a million times more space on the home LAN now!)  It used to take over 30 floppy discs to back-up, and the external drive unit was almost the size of a Mini-tower PC today!

By the end of 1989 and after two house moves, a new family and a full time job, most of the Beeb stuff was packed up and in boxes.  Over 15 years later, in about 2006, after two further moves, with nostalgia in my mind, some of it got unpacked again.   The hard disc seems to be unwilling to perform any more, but I did still have some backups.  In odd moments over the next year, and with an A5000 obtained from Freecycle running as a filesever, I managed to get a network up and running again between a stack of machines balanced on an overly small desk, and after a few false starts, restored a backup set!  Then we found out we were having a baby, and all time for tinkering stopped.

Three years later, with the addition of an ethernet card in the A5000, and much help from members of the BBC Micro mailing list, I got IP working and the A5000 on the LAN.  Unfortunately I was unable to find any SMB, FTP or NFS server software for the A5000 that would run on the RISC OS 3.1 A5000 , so nothing would actually talk to it.

In steps a RISC PC... It only took three days of snatched minutes here and there to get it to log into the Econet server across the ethernet.. and I finally had a machine that the riscos samba server would work on.  It crashes a LOT, so it's going to be unuseable, so I'm going to have to try another protocol, but at least it's a start: I mapped a drive on one of the PCs, and was able to list the directory!

So, over 20 years since I was last able to properly access this data, it looks like it's going to be available again!

I'm thinking that I'll have to move it all from the A5000 onto the RISC PC, and run the econet fileserver on there, then just use the A5000 as a gateway between the econet and the ethernet -that way I don't need to have both machines on as much - most of the time I'm going to want to be accessing it from a PC.

Once that's all done - next task is to sniff some of the AUN traffic (econet over ethernet) and adjust BeebEm's econet support to use that protocol - it will be rather cool to have an emulated BBC Micro talking to a real one across the networks!