I know ... Whatever ... well this post is intended for anyone looking for inspiration to keeping an X86 machine of any kind alive.
After pondering this idea for over a year, with several starts, then going off in N directions, most leading to dead ends, I have finally succeded in creating a working XENIX VM using VM Player.
I also gave Windows Virtual PC, and VIRTUAL BOX a try ... however ... neither worked with XENIX for different reasons.
Here are the steps I took to create a working XENIX VM in VM Player:
1) created a Sector by Sector Acronis Partition IMAGE Backup (tib file) from a working XENIX machine (True Image Home 2010) ... creating VM's can be created from scratch but I believe this has to be the simplest method.
2) dowloaded and installed VMware Player 6.0x (free) on a Win 7 Pro SP1 64b machine
3) downloaded and ran VMware-converter-en-5.5.0-1362012.exe (free)
to convert the Acronis tib backup file to a VM Player 6.0x machine
4) started up the VM and added Networking as a Bridged network
5) logged in to XENIX as root and ran scoadmin networking
a) removed all network hardware and protocols (3com)
b) added the IBM PCI Ethernet Adapter SCO TCP/IP
c) configured with a Static Address within the Router domain
d) rebuilt the kernel and rebooted
6) added a new firewall rule to Symantec to allow inbound Telnet from local domain addresses only
7) opened up the restriction in Symantec for unmatched IP traffic
That's it ... I now have a totally functional INFORMIX database in XENIX running in VM Player ... Note: this took me several days to work out so hopefully this should be easier for anyone else going forward.
Notes:
1) Acronis has a tool that converts TIB files to Windows Backup Files which can be loaded directly in to Windows Virtual PC ... XENIX wouldn't load in WVPC due to what appears to be unsupported hardware references used during the XENIX bootup ... XENIX aborted bootup because it was missing stuff ... there was nothing in the WVPC setup that allowed me to fix this issue
2) VIRTUAL BOX can directly load VMDK files (created by VM Player) ... unfortunately, in the case of XENIX, VIRTUAL BOX is not supporting all the aspects of TSS (Task Switching) so XENIX loads but won't switch in to X windows/multi tasking mode. There was some mention of this being corrected in prior versions of VB but I couldn't get past the TSS errors regardless of any configuration tweaks.
I mention these two VM's as they may work fine with other OS's ... I found it interesting that Acronis, in a round about way, provides 3 avenues to making a VM. Thank-you Acronis
After pondering this idea for over a year, with several starts, then going off in N directions, most leading to dead ends, I have finally succeded in creating a working XENIX VM using VM Player.
I also gave Windows Virtual PC, and VIRTUAL BOX a try ... however ... neither worked with XENIX for different reasons.
Here are the steps I took to create a working XENIX VM in VM Player:
1) created a Sector by Sector Acronis Partition IMAGE Backup (tib file) from a working XENIX machine (True Image Home 2010) ... creating VM's can be created from scratch but I believe this has to be the simplest method.
2) dowloaded and installed VMware Player 6.0x (free) on a Win 7 Pro SP1 64b machine
3) downloaded and ran VMware-converter-en-5.5.0-1362012.exe (free)
to convert the Acronis tib backup file to a VM Player 6.0x machine
4) started up the VM and added Networking as a Bridged network
5) logged in to XENIX as root and ran scoadmin networking
a) removed all network hardware and protocols (3com)
b) added the IBM PCI Ethernet Adapter SCO TCP/IP
c) configured with a Static Address within the Router domain
d) rebuilt the kernel and rebooted
6) added a new firewall rule to Symantec to allow inbound Telnet from local domain addresses only
7) opened up the restriction in Symantec for unmatched IP traffic
That's it ... I now have a totally functional INFORMIX database in XENIX running in VM Player ... Note: this took me several days to work out so hopefully this should be easier for anyone else going forward.
Notes:
1) Acronis has a tool that converts TIB files to Windows Backup Files which can be loaded directly in to Windows Virtual PC ... XENIX wouldn't load in WVPC due to what appears to be unsupported hardware references used during the XENIX bootup ... XENIX aborted bootup because it was missing stuff ... there was nothing in the WVPC setup that allowed me to fix this issue
2) VIRTUAL BOX can directly load VMDK files (created by VM Player) ... unfortunately, in the case of XENIX, VIRTUAL BOX is not supporting all the aspects of TSS (Task Switching) so XENIX loads but won't switch in to X windows/multi tasking mode. There was some mention of this being corrected in prior versions of VB but I couldn't get past the TSS errors regardless of any configuration tweaks.
I mention these two VM's as they may work fine with other OS's ... I found it interesting that Acronis, in a round about way, provides 3 avenues to making a VM. Thank-you Acronis