Virtual Servers

Mar 5 2012

Booting from IDE drive when there are SATA drives

This is a generic sort of article… I have only tried it on one type of machine but this advice may prove useful in other situations.

As regular readers know, I volunteer at an educational non-profit organisation every Friday as a systems administrator.One of the privileges is I get to borrow a computer every so often for one of my projects. In this case I had a computer I was using as a file server (using FreeNAS v7.x). Since I had it for over three years I figured it was time to get something a little newer. A client returned a Dell GX 270 because he no longer needed it. I asked and was granted permission to replace the older machine with this one.

At first I only had two hard drives to work with. The first was the hard drive from the old computer and the second was the drive from the new one. I was able to boot from the old drive with no problem. Adding in the new drive so it would be accessed over my LAN was also easy. I had a third drive. It was a 500GB SATA drive. I had everything but the power adapter so it took a few days to connect.

The SATA drive was one I had in my Linux box before the motherboard died. It still had all the information as well as the master boot record intact. Once it was added into the 270 it wanted to take over. Like Macs there is an option which allows the user to select which drive to boot from. For a file server that’s not an acceptable solution. In this case it didn’t work very well either. The boot process was hung for 15 minutes…

After a bit of research on the net I found the solution was to boot from a rescue CD/DVD and toggle the bootable flag on the first partition on the hard drive to off. From that point things worked fine. I don’t know if the hard drive works or not since it was only yesterday I added it to the machine. Assuming there are no hardware problems I should be able to do a bunch of neat things like create virtual machines which are stored on  the LAN, set up a private iTunes server, and back up the Mini I am using at the moment…

By BlankMike • Disk Images, Disk Storage, Emulation, File Utilities, Freeware, Hardware, Public Domain, Software, Virtual Servers • 0

Feb 12 2012

Apple ][ Game Server and Disk Server Now Available in Mobile form

 

Egan Ford, creator and curator of the Apple ][ Game Server and the Apple ][  Disk Server has created mobile versions of the website.  This allows those users with iPhones to use the iOS based device to load their Apple ][ computer with games or disks directly from the Internet.

The mobile version of the Apple ][ Game Server is at:

http://asciiexpress.net/gameserver/mobile.html

The Apple ][ Disk Server mobile version  is currently being built and will be available soon. now available and ready for use:

http://asciiexpress.net/diskserver/mobile.html

By admin • Apple ][, arcade, Disk Images, Disk Imaging, Emulation, Games, Software, Virtual Servers • 0 • Tags: , , , ,

Feb 5 2012

Apple ][ Disk Server Updated with Virtual Apple Database

Egan ford has added the entire Apple ][ collection from Virtual Apple's website to the Apple ][ Disk Server.   The Apple Disk Server version 0.991 now has over 1500 disks that are ready to go on your Apple ][.

This update was made possible by a contribution of a partial section of the Virtual Apple ][ database by Bill Martens.  You can access the Apple ][ disk server at:

http://asciiexpress.net/diskserver/

By admin • Apple ][, Disk Imaging, Emulation, Virtual Servers • 0 • Tags: , ,

Jan 19 2012

A2Server Released by Ivanrucker

Ivan Drucker has released his Apple ][ Server, a linux based setup which allows Apple //e’s with workstation cards and Apple IIgs’s that are network capable to connect.  The file server is offered in a complete, ready to go setup that is downloadable from Ivan’s website.

A2Sever allows users to boot ProDOS 8 or GS/OS over the network after uploading the media from your Mac or Windows based machines.  According to Ivan, the real gist of the A2Server is that it is “A2SERVER is comprised of Netatalk 2.1.6, running on Ubuntu Server 11.10, inside an Oracle VirtualBox 4.1.8 virtual machine, plus various scripts I wrote and utilities from others to make everything smooth.”

To download the server and the complete documentation, go to Ivan’s website at:

http://appleii.ivanx.com/a2server/index.html

By admin • Apple IIgs, Apple ][, Emulation, Vintage, Virtual Servers • 0 • Tags: , , , ,

Feb 21 2010

Virtual Apple ][ Website Updated

by A.P.P.L.E. Staff

The Virtual Apple ][ website has been upgraded to allow emulation on all platforms for their Apple ][ section.  The emulation site which is popular among educators for their games and ease of use in the classroom has long been criticized for their support of only Windows based platforms.

That has all changed thanks to the efforts of Marc Ressl and Nick Westgate.   Using a modified version of Marc’s AppleIIGo emulator, the new Virtual Apple ][ website now runs on any platform which supports Java.

Several features have also been included in the new version including the Mockingboard sound, faster emulator, full sized emulator that allows complete control over the emulator without other items getting in the way.

The only installation this emulator requires is Java which can be downloaded from the Sun Microsystems Java website at http://www.java.org.

Once you have Java installed, you will be up and running by just clicking on one of the over 1400 programs on the site’s menus.

For more information or to play the games, check out the Virtual Apple ][ website at:

http://www.virtualapple.org

By billm • A.P.P.L.E., Apple IIgs, Apple ][, Emulation, Emulators, Vintage, Virtual Servers • 0 • Tags: , , , , , ,