I have a NeXTstation color turbo which I have fired up for the first time in a very, very long time. Its hard drive is still going strong, but I would like to dump it to a backup image of some sort, or at least tar out its contents, for some piece of mind. It's running 3.2.
The problem is that (1) I don't have any SCSI2 hardware and (2) the networking facilities on the machine are old enough that I'm getting stymied in attempts to attach via NFS etc.
I was hoping to just come up with a strategy to dump a dd stream or whatnot over ssh; but I can't even do ssh because the machine's ssh version is too old and bombs ("incorrect packet length") on connecting to machines in the wider world.
What approaches would you suggest for getting the data off of this box?
Hallo feijai,
maybe you can use an ooold Live Linux CD (like Knoppix or SUSE Linux) to boot up a PC with it.
Think in the early 2000-years I could SSH (version 1) from Linux to the NeXT machines.
Alternatively, if you have enough space on your NeXT hard drive, you could tar/gzip all relevant folders into /tmp and then transfer the package via FTP to an other PC. FTP server on NeXT was quite easy to start, but not sure if it is still possible to connect to it from modern systems. If not, maybe the other way round will work.
I used to backup onto SCSI ZIP drives (those 100MB disks), but you already wrote, that you do not have SCSI equipment, right?
Cheers, Nuss
You could try to set up a NeXTstep install in an x86 virtual machine (VMware, Virtualbox) or m68k emulator (Previous, but I don't know the state of the network support) and then use e.g. NFS between your real NeXT and the VM.
The VM (raw) disk image can then be mounted using FUSE (supports the NeXT versions of the BSD file system), so you can access the backup.
Alternatively, rmt [1,2] might be worth a try, there seems to be an rmt server for Linux [3], but I don't know if the protocols are (still) compatible
[1]
http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/NeXTStep/3.3/nsa/08_BackUp.htmld/index.html#8rr [2]
http://www.polarhome.com/service/man/?qf=rmt&tf=2&of=NeXTSTEP&sf=8C[3]
https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/1-rmt/
Is there anywhere I can buy an external SCSI2 hard drive cheaply?
I think my next attempt will have to write some custom socket code to stream a dd or tar over the network to a remote machine... :-(
Get an SCSI2SD which you can use as a SCSI drive on the NeXT. Either to create a clone of your internal disk and boot from it or transfer data to the modern world. It uses SD cards.
Hello: You can make a clone backup using the hyrens cd software , I may try and see if it will work scsi hard drive to scsi2sd .
This is an old thread, but maybe people are still checking in on this like I did.
I used a ZuluSCSI 2040 device and put it in "SCSI initiator mode", then connected the original hard drive of my NeXTstation Turbo Mono to it. A few minutes later, I had a full image on the SD card in the ZuluSCSI. Very convenient.