If you’re one of the four, five, maybe even six people
out there on the Internet who want to set up an A/UX web server, then this guide is for you. To make things simpler, this document follows a few standard conventions. Text in Courier is reserved for terminal sessions. This provides a sample walkthrough of commands to type and their usual responses. For example: A larger courier font is used to denote relevant commands mid-sentence, such as newconfig, in order to separate the command from the rest of the text. File and path names, such as /etc/inittab, are in bold. Individual references to filenames without paths like inittab aren’t.

Note:
The famous Mac Bomb symbol is used to denote a tip or note. Small notes like these provide hints and tips as well as insight drawn from bitter experience.

Make sure you read them!
One small point; there are many instances where command lines are preceded by either a # or $ symbol. The # refers to the root user and the $ symbol refers to a regular user. In either case, don’t type the symbol. To make matters even more confusing, most of the configuration files used in this guide use leading # symbols to define comments. It’s confusing but it’s the UNIX convention, not ours. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.

Credit Where Credit’s Due
This guide simply wouldn’t exist without the prior work of many others. In particular, I’d like to thank Scott from aux-penelope for letting me use his screenshots of the installation process and Nic Leymann for his work in porting the GNU tools used in this guide across to A/UX. Finally, I’d like to thank Jim Jagielski, who’s FAQ, patches and all round coolness has made this possible. Without the work of these guys, my Quadra would probably be running NetBSD

Introduction
For many people, Mac OSX is the Operating System of choice; the fusion of traditional Mac OS friendliness with the stability of BSD has been deemed by many commentators and pundits to be revolutionary. This ‘revolution’ is not unique, nor is it Apple’s first attempt. The first version of A/UX was released in 1988, and was available on 55 floppies, a 150Mb tape, or pre-installed on an 80Mb hard drive. The last version of A/UX, 3.1.1, was released in 1995. My first experience with A/UX was in 2004; 9 years later. Needless to say, documentation and help was thin on the ground, so this guide was born.

Before You Start
A/UX is not a toy OS. It requires a lot of care and attention that by modern standards would be seen as insane. The OS itself is fairly stable once patched up and left alone, but was written by an infinite amount of Apple-branded monkeys chained to an infinite amount of Mac Classics. To make matters worse, they probably had to use PageMaker for a large portion of it. Bearing this in mind, there are some things you should be made aware of before you start:

A/UX only runs on certain hardware. A good place to check if yours is supported is http://www.aux-penelope.com/hardware.htm. If your hardware isn’t on the list it doesn’t mean that A/UX won’t run, but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t. A/UX definitely shouldn’t work on LCs, Quadra AVs or anything without an MMU or FPU. In terms of memory and space requirements, an 80Mb Hard Disk should be enough for a minimal install, although you’ll need at least 120Mb if you want to do anything with the system. 4Mb of RAM is the official minimum to run A/UX. I’d be uncomfortable with less than 16Mb simply because of the amount of space MacOS 7 and the Finder take up. To put things into perspective, this guide was tested on a Quadra 650 with a 250Mb Hard Disk and 128Mb of RAM – Quite a powerhouse by comparison.

The Unix side of A/UX is based on SVR2.2, with elements of BSD and later SVR versions thrown in for good measure. It implements some POSIX extensions. Consequently you may find that your favourite piece of software may not compile cleanly, or at all. This gets worse with A/UX 3.1 or above. On the subject of compiling, A/UX came with a lot of things other UNIX providers charged extra for. Sockets, Streams, A TCP/IP stack, a C compiler and even an X11R5 implementation all come as standard with A/UX 3.0.1. It’s not as great as you think. The C compiler is cursed for eternity never to compile any reasonably sized piece of code, the TCP/IP stack falls over and the X11 implementation source can be found in the dead-sea scrolls. Thankfully some nice people managed to port GCC across along with some libraries that make compiling a little easier.
Finally, make sure you’ve backed everything up beforehand as it’s all going to get wiped.

Download pdf The A/UX Web Server Deployment Guide A SnakeOil Labs White Paper