Kai's Adventures in NeXT Land - Part 7

Hello world,

I'm back after a very brief break, and have to say thanks to my friend for giving me the impetus to get up into the retro loft to record the sounds for the last post.
This led me to begin noodling around with the NeXT Cube this evening.

Now, as you may remember a few posts back I was going to attempt for my next endeavour to get the cube connected to my network and possibly more.

Well......

I had a bit of a hallelujah moment! (yes, I tried to embed that sound file here but kept failing and gave up).

I could just post the last picture here, but I won't, Join me on my excursion into the dark side of Terminal land, and the trials and tribulations of blind, manual IP config.

On to business.......

First off, everything that was intuitive to me personally (and potentially others as well) when configuring the IP settings was wrong!

Simple Network Starter sounds like it does exactly what it says on the tin, and goes through what appears to be all the motions, and then.... Fail.

This box truly makes you realise how easy we have it now, you plug in a network cable, and it just "works"

First off, I had to Manually add the DNS servers, also referred to nameservers, to the /etc/resolv.conf file (note the spelling, this sent me round in circles for a while I can tell you!)
I added my own router, Virgin and Googles DNS servers.
This file doesn't exist by the way, so you have to create it.
And another feature that carried over into Mac land, is that everything is .rtf by default, and you have to edit the file to not be when using it for conf files.

Resolv.conf

Next you have to edit the host in NetInfoManager (Mac OS 9 anyone) to add your IP, & Domain is added here also, I kept it simple with my main RAVE domain.

Memories of OS 9

Edit your Hostname and check domain, making sure the aliases are correct.

More inputting

Put your usual network settings in, double triple check them!

Mmm, IP's

Ok, So I best look for a browser, I hear Onmiweb is pretty good on the NeXT OS?

Omniwebs R us

Ooh look, It has it own little local html welcome page :)

Om nom nom nom nomniweb

Right, lets try a website.........

www.ravepants.co.uk if you must know

Hallelujah, haaaalleeeeelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, halleluuuuuuuuuujaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Much merriment ensued I can asure you, I was jiggling like a looney around the room.

Sadly when I tried to view Tim Berners Lee's first website at CERN, it didnt seem to want to work :( and browsing google.co.uk literally opens the page in pure HTML, I think this is due to how sites are rendered and new browsers work.

But I'm very happy I got this far :)

For now, this concludes the adventures NeXT Land.

It's been a fun journey of discovery for me, and hopefully for you reading this as well.

I'll wrap up by saying this is proof if ever it was needed that you can take a system you've never used before, a minute amount of information about it, and still achieve something wonderful and completely captivating for yourself with a bit of effort and time.

So, what's 

Outtakes:

Huge clouds of dust everywhere, in most posts!

2 cut fingers.

1 cut thumb.

Lot's of body part scratches/nicks.

2 cases of red eye from dust, and many more from lack of sleep.

Hours of head scratching.

1 ruined duster.

1 clogged vacuum.

A Lot of swearing.

At least 4 DOH moments.

Over 50 reboots.

Lots of incorrectly spelt Terminal commands.

3 counts of logging in as Me instead of Root and wondering why commands didn't work.

Hours and hours of search engine use.

Computer widow partner for quite a while (Sorry Sarah)

Some things you didn't see in this post:

https://sites.google.com/site/benvirtualbox/home/nextstep

This document was a godsend.

http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Docs/TjLs_Cable_Modem_Guide.pdf

A load of Terminal commands that were too numerous to keep taking photos of.

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