Speed... speed... speed!
Oct. 16th, 2005 09:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhialtoWatching download progress counters is mesmerising. I do it far too much. Or compilation progress. Or things like that. Usually it's something Internet-related though.
For some reason[4] I started UAE (the Unix/Universal/Usomethingelse Amiga Emulator), and fetched my CD of Amiga Forever for the necessary ROM image (I have a complimentary copy because my MessyFileSystem is on it). But emulations lack one thing: my own working and programming environment, the one that I spent adapting to my tastes for so many years. I think I still like AmigaOS better than BeOS...
So I got a great idea: to backup my Amiga 4000 hard disks to my NetBSD system! I whipped out trusty old Kermit and a null-modem cable, which I connected to the third-party serial ports (which I have because I blew up the built-in port one day).
So, how fast would I go? 9600 bps? Nah, too slow. 19200? That's for wimps. 57600? That's more like it. But why not go for 115200?
Ok, so then it turned out that my Amiga's Kermit doesn't know yet about recursive directory transfers[1].
Fortunately the "list all" command can produce recursive directory listings, in a way, so I could write a Perl script to turn those into scripts for Kermit to fetch each file separately. To add to the fun, some files have really weird characters in their names, requiring multiple backslashes to be added. For some reason, not all files get the correct time stamp when transferred. And in my initial version I did not match files that had size "empty" rather than something numeric. I noticed that there is a surprising number of volumes and directories that are named "Empty" but are quite full. ("Empty" is the default name suggested by the "Format" command)
To make it more fun, the file system has some hard and soft links, which were somewhat experimental, and the "list" command doesn't handle them properly.
But, now I can have some quality staring-at-progress time[2]! (The whole weekend already... and there is a couple hundred megabytes still to go)[3].
[1] It knows a whole lot of other good things though, being version 6.0.192: sliding windows, long packets, unprefixed control characters...
[2] The 115200 bps turns out to be an effective 8000-10000 cps. For some reason there is sometimes a long pause when starting a transfer. Maybe the high speeds corrupts the initial packet, but it also happens at half the speed, so there seems to be little reason to reduce it.
[3] The noise of the extra computers in the bedroom forced me to sleep in the living room last night already, and this night again... I'm only about 35% through the first 503 MB partition.
[4] Perhaps because the snooker I'm watching uses a logo that resembles the Amiga Boing! ball a lot.
For some reason[4] I started UAE (the Unix/Universal/Usomethingelse Amiga Emulator), and fetched my CD of Amiga Forever for the necessary ROM image (I have a complimentary copy because my MessyFileSystem is on it). But emulations lack one thing: my own working and programming environment, the one that I spent adapting to my tastes for so many years. I think I still like AmigaOS better than BeOS...
So I got a great idea: to backup my Amiga 4000 hard disks to my NetBSD system! I whipped out trusty old Kermit and a null-modem cable, which I connected to the third-party serial ports (which I have because I blew up the built-in port one day).
So, how fast would I go? 9600 bps? Nah, too slow. 19200? That's for wimps. 57600? That's more like it. But why not go for 115200?
Ok, so then it turned out that my Amiga's Kermit doesn't know yet about recursive directory transfers[1].
Fortunately the "list all" command can produce recursive directory listings, in a way, so I could write a Perl script to turn those into scripts for Kermit to fetch each file separately. To add to the fun, some files have really weird characters in their names, requiring multiple backslashes to be added. For some reason, not all files get the correct time stamp when transferred. And in my initial version I did not match files that had size "empty" rather than something numeric. I noticed that there is a surprising number of volumes and directories that are named "Empty" but are quite full. ("Empty" is the default name suggested by the "Format" command)
To make it more fun, the file system has some hard and soft links, which were somewhat experimental, and the "list" command doesn't handle them properly.
But, now I can have some quality staring-at-progress time[2]! (The whole weekend already... and there is a couple hundred megabytes still to go)[3].
[1] It knows a whole lot of other good things though, being version 6.0.192: sliding windows, long packets, unprefixed control characters...
[2] The 115200 bps turns out to be an effective 8000-10000 cps. For some reason there is sometimes a long pause when starting a transfer. Maybe the high speeds corrupts the initial packet, but it also happens at half the speed, so there seems to be little reason to reduce it.
[3] The noise of the extra computers in the bedroom forced me to sleep in the living room last night already, and this night again... I'm only about 35% through the first 503 MB partition.
[4] Perhaps because the snooker I'm watching uses a logo that resembles the Amiga Boing! ball a lot.