Well, just after International Backup Day, I proved to myself my own saying that “no matter how many backups you have, it’s always too few”.

For some reason, my GlobalTalk node related to my Apple Internet Router Administrator’s Guide—Addendum I released last year was not being backed up like all my other VMs.

I just run a cron job once a week (Sunday early morning, my least likely time to be awake) that vacuums most of the files on my Ubuntu VMs and zips them up into a new archive in a folder on my Mac. I just delete the old archive after the new one completes.

I think perhaps because it was such a sparse node while I was setting up last year – just sort of a “first port of call” for people following the instructions in my Addendum – that I didn’t pay heed to the Three Golden Rules of Computing™:

1. Backup.
2. Backup!!
3. BACKUP!!!

Couple that with a “delete the whole VM” command being right next to the “reboot vm” command (great UI, folks!), them both asking for some sort of confirmation ("delete boot disk, too” vs “reboot immediately”) which my mind conflated after 10-15 reboots, and boom! VM and boot disk gone, unrecoverable.

Thankfully, it’s not a critical machine, and other than it being a slow VM shape, I’ve been able to get something back online reasonably quickly (and it’s fully clean, so there’s that) – and yes, I have set up the cron job on the new VM!

I’ve lost some greets from the last year, almost all of which are on my main GlobalTalk node anyway, and the collection of files I put in the AppleShared folder for guests (I have all of it, just don’t have the particular combination of files I put in there).

There’s only one silver lining – I was able to test my setup disk images from go to woe again after not having done so since I last revised them last year...they work!

As a celebration of getting the node back online, guests who access the share will see the icon I was working on earlier tonight. More celebratory for me than anyone else, but still.

Don’t make me tap the sign! ☝🏻

#GlobalTalk #BackupBackupBackup

I blame @kalleboo!

Custom icon for my Airaga Share on GlobalTalk – it’s the graphic from the front cover of the Apple Internet Router Administrator’s Guide.

#FatBits #GlobalTalk

Was checking my router config for unrelated reasons when I went over to the bandwidth monitor tab and remembered it splits out AURP usage.

For the month of #MARCHintosh, my network uploaded nearly 300 *mega bytes* of data to #GlobalTalk !

Quick little goodbye and see you next year for #marchintosh #globaltalk

https://youtu.be/M0Croj34fGc

So now that #MARCHintosh is over, I spent the day doing some network reconfiguration.

Can folks still see and connect to my #GlobalTalk shared volumes? Any performance improvement?

I've switched from the QEMU VM running AIR in Mac System 7.1, over to a modern Debian Linux VM running the LToUDP fork of jrouter.

It was a bit of a pain to get everything going again - what finally made everything work was sticking to a VM on my Mac Mini instead of trying to run it all on the Pi or my NAS. There's junk that gets appended to the end of my AppleTalk packets when they cross over my Wifi bridges, and so the routing needs to happen behind one of them in order for everything to work correctly.

I'm not committing to this new setup yet, but I'll probably leave it running for a week or so and see how stable things are compared to the previous AIR setup.

Anyway, now that I have LToUDP working, it means I can access GlobalTalk volumes from my laptop without the need for a Wifi bridge (or a separate laptop), as long as I'm using Mini vMac or Snow.

Is there a definitive answer to “what is the latest model Mac that can run Apple Internet Router 3?” for connecting to #globaltalk ?

What are the given dependencies that we know about? MacTCP vs Open Transport, what Max. OS version, 68K vs PPC.

Now that #MARCHintosh is over I want to do some experimenting. This also coincides with my new resolution to not use emulation for anything. Really hardware and back in the day software.

GlobalTalk admins using non-standard Ethernet interfaces in System 7.1...

Can you please PM a screenshot of your Network and MacTCP settings (first screen only for MacTCP, examples attached) – 1 bit B/W preferred.

I'm wanting to make my AIR manual addendum, and GlobalTalk setup instructions and files more generic.

I'd also be interested in which Ethernet drivers were necessary to get your interface to work with AIR under System 7.1.

Lastly, I'm interested in having a chat with users of Snow, mini vMac, Basilisk II, and other non-QEMU emulators about GlobalTalk connection requirements and setup in System 7.1.

I will credit contributions, of course!

Thank you, and boosts appreciated!

#GlobalTalk #MARCHintosh #BlueSCSI

Okay, I was wrong the other day. Couldn't waste half of an iron-on transfer sheet, so there's one more #MARCHintosh #GlobalTalk Canvas fashion piece up for grabs.

This one is for the iron-on transfer to make one of your garments *infinitely* more fashionable! It's even “keepin' it real,”as I'm sure the kids still say, by coming fresh out of an ImageWriter 🖨️

Reply to this toot with ‘fashion' for a chance to win.

The hat-o-matic will make its decision tomorrow, Friday 3 April.