[defaultrouteuk]

Hi Comrades,

In preparation for the new lounge thingy I thought it might be an idea to do a soft launch so to speak, to test one of the membership services with some load. I'm pretty sure most of you retroheads will have been using WRP or else browservice to get your old browsers using todays internet. If not then of course you should check out the github:

Web Rendering Proxy
Browservice
Lunduke article

Anyway, once you understand the idea and cutting a long story short here is the URL: 

URL: proxy.nekotopia.io and you can use HTTP or HTTPS. 
HTTP-AUT: irixnet / irixnet (lowercase). 

NOTE: There are no logs, but that's more to save my disk than your pride.

There is also no auto-forwarding from HTTP to S so if your old browser support HTTPS then use whichever. Most likely you'll use the HTTP link. The launch service will have an SSH tunnel option as well as a VPN (OpenVPN, L2TP and SSTP) for high encryption to remove the last mile risk. The proxy has been tested by a few and seemed to work OK but it makes sense to me that a wider pool have the option to provide some feedback. I've limited the throughput to 10Mbps and there is a GEO block on it also so if you can't access it and you think you are not that billionaire Prince from Nigeria let me know and I'll whitelist you. Share with whoever and let me know how performance or functionality plays out, I'd be interested in constructive feedback.

Regards
Rich

[Raion]

Thank you, I appreciate your hard work.

[defaultrouteuk]

Thank you, I appreciate your hard work.

Hey Raion - mate, it's been a heap of fun as well as the stress of getting everything ready. Everyone in this community, EVERYONE, is absolutely welcome to get involved or do whatever. I'll share what I can and I'm open to constructive criticism if it helps the project and the community. In other news I've never spent so much time on eBay in my entire life. Your Onyx2 boards will make this guy happy...

   

Everyone, meet Zaphod. He's a grumpy old man and is currently racked in one of our racks in Manchester, UK. zaphod will be taking care of the WebFORCE project while the Origin200 is being repaired by the great man who needs no introduction, Mr Ian Mapelson. Raions boards will get us a Quad 400Mhz system and I'm hoping Ian can find some RAM to help me get her to 8GB.

Code:

zaphod 1# hinv
2 400 MHZ IP27 Processors
CPU: MIPS R12000 Processor Chip Revision: 3.5
FPU: MIPS R12010 Floating Point Chip Revision: 3.5
Main memory size: 3072 Mbytes
Instruction cache size: 32 Kbytes
Data cache size: 32 Kbytes
Secondary unified instruction/data cache size: 8 Mbytes
Integral SCSI controller 0: Version QL1040B, single ended
  Tape drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0: DAT
  Disk drive: unit 2 on SCSI controller 0
  Disk drive: unit 3 on SCSI controller 0
  Disk drive: unit 4 on SCSI controller 0
  Disk drive: unit 5 on SCSI controller 0
  CDROM: unit 6 on SCSI controller 0

Here's a picture of Slartibartfast before we carted him back to Ian for a brain transplant.

   

The O200 was working fine but then suddenly decided today was a great day for a holiday in sunny Edinburgh. 

Code:

Initializing all memory ...........         DONE
*** Nasid 0: CPU B was previously Present & Disabled but is now Absent                                            
Checking partitioning information .........              DONE
No other nodes present; becoming partition master                                                                 
Loading BASEIO prom .......................              DONE
Nasid 0: CPU B was previously Present & Disabled but is now Absent

[rbz]

This is a wicked cool idea, I will give this a shot with my SGIs and NeXTs tomorrow. I am guessing the SGI should be fine with mozilla but if it can work with OmniWeb on the NeXT that would be awesome.

[sgt_barnes]

Hey, defaultrouteuk!

This is awesome, man! Good work!

I gave it a try with the ancient Internet Explorer 5.5 on the Alpha, and it works like a charm!

Thank you!

Hope Slartibartfast and Zaphod are going to be well and up again, soon!

[defaultrouteuk]

Hey @sgt_barnes and @rbz, the kind replies are appreciated. I am an infrastructure guy so find it hard to engage with the usual use cases for SGI on graphics. I mean the clue is in the name right:-)

Still, in the mid to late 90s, as you know, SGI deviated heavily into datacenter, supercomputing and of course the web. I can at least therefore offer some constructive platform for this scenario. The two machines you saw are the first of what I hope can become accessible by the community for furthering development and creative endeavours. It would be nice to hope that experts and enthusiasts who may not have hands-on access to SGI equipment can at least have remote access to some part of this amazing system.

As an extension of this centralised platform there is also a VPN allowing connected nodes to share their homelab equipment. So maybe they would be of some use. Anything that can be networked should be able to connect to the VPN and permit access in and outbound for people to enjoy your own home lab! If you are worried about security then sure, that makes sense. To help with that concern I’ve put an inline IPS and firewall option (you can choose to use it or else be entirely clear channel). You can have a private IP (walled garden) or public (fully routed) IP. Heck, if you want to go crazy you can have multiple tunnels and even host a public subnet. I’ve tried to be creative and include access options for a number of protocols to give the best chance of adoption. L2TP, SSTP, IKE and OpenVPN are currently working but I could consider PPTP.

Just ideas, if you have ideas let me know. If I can build it I will.

Thanks again for the feedback! That actually makes a difference, I was getting a bit low with the subscription and feedback but this has pepped me up!

Cheers
Richie

[rbz]

This is a wicked cool idea, I will give this a shot with my SGIs and NeXTs tomorrow. I am guessing the SGI should be fine with mozilla but if it can work with OmniWeb on the NeXT that would be awesome.

As suspected this works great with mozilla on the SGI (whatever version IRIX 6.5.30 shipped with) but sadly it appears whatever it needs to work OmniWeb doesn't support on NeXTSTEP because all I get is a blank page. I am guessing its JS support that is lacking. 

This is a great service for those of us who have all this old hardware but were abandoned by the modern web. Thanks again!

[defaultrouteuk]

***PLEASE READ***

Dear Community,

My thanks to 'rbz' for bringing this to my attention.

What is the background

The browseproxy generates a random session-id everytime you go to it. There is a session 'stickiness' added by thge NGINX load balancer to make sure you always stay on that node but apart from that there is no cache except for the session to the browseproxy to identify a unique sesion. The NGINX does not provide for caching but does offer SSL offload as appropriate.


What is the problem?

User rbz noted that in one session he inherited session details of a previous user when he accessed the Irixnet forum. As the good citizen he immediately logged out and back in again. There is therefore some reason why he had that access. I've looked at the logs and there is not much of a breadcrumb trail on this one.

What is the solution?

At this time, the problem may outweigh the benefit of the product. We need to take a very serious look at the reasoning behind the fault and see if I can find a work around. I've considered a cron routine to wipe and restart the daemon on a regular basis. My advice right now is to follow good personal administration, exactly as you would in a cafe. If you are using authenticated accesses try to use the secure proxy. If you are using the clear text service then at least don't forget to logout of that session when you are done.

I'll keep you guys updated on the workaround or if I can find the root cause.
Cheers