Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net: A Retro Internet for Retro Computers

Añadido: 2026-05-04

[00:00:05]I don't know.

[00:00:18]>> Okay, just to double check, everyone's here for the retro internet talk, right?

[00:00:21]A bunch of people are in the wrong room.

[00:00:24]>> Okay, so Furry Tail got lost, so we're gonna start now. So, hi, I'm Kur Silicon. I used to be a Linux administrator and then Amazon gave me horrible burnout as it happens. I also hoard a lot of horrible retro computers.

[00:00:39]Some of you may have seen them. Hayden has definitely seen many of them. She has given me many of them as well. She's the reason I have this lovely shirt cuz I now have like a dozen sun machines.

[00:00:50]And also have a YouTube channel that you should check out. There they are. Hi, Furry Tail.

[00:00:56]>> [applause] >> And if you'd like, you can follow me on YouTube. There's a QR code that might work. I don't know how well it'll work with being crushed by the projection, but you can try it.

[00:01:07]So, this is a team project. So, here's the team. So, there's me. I kind of founded the project. I had the whole idea. I pay for the infrastructure. And I'm also the oldest person on the team, aka I'm a millennial.

[00:01:20]Then we have Snap. He lives in Germany.

[00:01:22]He saw me on Macedon. was like, "Oh, that's a fun idea. Let me go and build that in like two hours."

[00:01:28]So, he knows a ton about like DevOps work, built a ton of the OpenWRT stack that we use. Shout out to OpenWRT who are downstairs. They'll come up again.

[00:01:39]And yeah, he knows way too much about networking. It's kind of crazy. We also have Laganius from Nebraska. He wrote our signup page, which you can find at cgmn.org.

[00:01:50]He also does a lot of Wii U stuff. He got multi-core working because the Wii U has a really broken CPU where it's basically three iMac G3s glued together.

[00:02:02]And yeah, that's a whole other thing. He should probably give a talk about that one day. [clears throat] And yeah, he also fixes a lot of the typos I make because I sit there on a very laggy putty terminal from Windows XP putting an IP addresses for bind.

[00:02:15]And then finally, we have Goth Panda who built a real website, not one in front page 2003 like I used. He also wrote some lovely looking glass tools because writing a retro internet things break.

[00:02:26]Networking is hard. It breaks a lot. And he also runs a service called Neato, which is a fun clone of Yahoo because when you build a retro internet, you need a directory so people know what's out there to look at.

[00:02:41]We also have like a bunch more people that use the network, of which there are 20 here. And we have nearly 30 people that are not mentioned that are contributors and 90 users which is pretty good for a first year project.

[00:02:54]So this is the first question I always get is why is it called copy global hyperagget and I tell them if this works it comes from the Simpsons cuz of course it does.

[00:03:04]>> What exactly is it your company does again?

[00:03:07]>> Oh this industry moves so fast it's really hard to tell. That's why I need a name that's cutting edge like Cutco, Edgecom, Inter Slice. Come on, Merge. You're good at these. Help me out.

[00:03:19]>> How about Comp Global Hyper Megaet?

[00:03:22]>> Fine. It's not important. What really matters is my title. I think I'll make myself vice president. No, wait. Junior vice president.

[00:03:34]>> And yes, that doesn't mean I am >> Exactly.

[00:03:37]I am junior vice president for silicon because it's my project and I can be whatever title I want.

[00:03:43]So then people ask what's a retro ISP?

[00:03:46]What do you offer? So before I get into that, I need to do one more video about semantics because there are people and have been people over the last year that have been very nitpicky about the way I describe this project. So what we mean by lying is the concept of lies to children. The idea that on the path to explaining something complicated, you start off with a little lie, a useful oversimplification that makes it easier to grasp a concept. For example, as a kid, you learn that the Earth is a sphere orbiting the sun with planet buddies. But it's not actually a sphere and the buddies are super different in size and not close to each other at all. By beginning at a place of oversimplification, you're building a framework, a foundation that you can then build upon and add nuance [music] and complexity later on. Step by step, you're getting towards the real gist of the complicated subject. [music] Science communication has to use lies to children to some degree or it turns into science education and getting a proper education in all of the scientific fields would take years of intense study to become fluent in them.

[00:04:57]Okay. So, with that in mind, >> what we mean by lying is the concept >> I'm just going to Yeah, this talk is for everybody. If I say something you disagree with or use a terminology you disagree with, that's okay. Please don't get mad at me. This is meant to be for everyone. It's very high level.

[00:05:16]So, what is a retro ISP?

[00:05:19]So, there's a lot of retro YouTubers out there that are way better than I am, and they have built dialup internet providers. Usually, they'll take two modems and an ATA and have one dial the other. And they'll be like, "Look, it's dialup internet. Now, let's go to Google and then it just kind of loads really slowly and you can't really do a lot with it." And frankly, they've done better at this than I could have. For one, they have a lot more telco knowledge than I do. But you've dialed up Now, what do you do? What do you do with it? Listening to a modem dialed 30 times in a row is not that entertaining.

[00:05:55]But again, there's not a lot out there to do. Like, modern websites don't work.

[00:06:00]Google will actually just throw an SSLA error at you or tell you your browser is too old. And anything that does load, it's on dialup. It's slow. Your gigabytes of JavaScript to load CNN.com is not going to work on dialup. And you probably don't want to go connecting Windows XP to the open internet anymore.

[00:06:19]That's just a bad idea for security.

[00:06:21]So at originally this concept was I have a computer, my friend Thomas has a computer in Germany. How do we connect and do retro things with each other?

[00:06:32]And we had the idea of why not build a retro internet for retro computers? How hard could it be? Actually, did I skip?

[00:06:42]No, I didn't. So, as old projects, how hard could it be? But a little bit of background of what the internet actually is, both like literally and historically. So, you all probably heard of the ARPANET when we were fighting the Soviets. You know, they're like, "Oh, if they nuke where all the computers are stored, that's bad. What if we could link them all together so we could exchange information, have backups?"

[00:07:10]And this was apparently the original design of the Arpanet. was just two computers linked to each other. We'll come back to this later.

[00:07:18]And then we had BBS's where you could have a phone and you could have your computer sit there and listen for phone calls and then call other computers, basically your neighbors or long distance if you really wanted your parents to hate you because long distance was expensive back in like the 80s.

[00:07:35]And then we got TCIP and the worldwide web which is basically where we are. And it got faster. We got flat screens. Like these are just clip art graphics, but you get the idea. But how did me and Thomas connect in 2019, which is when this project originally gestated in my head?

[00:07:54]So, we all got stuck at home and we had nothing to do. Y'all probably remember that that lovely event that never ended.

[00:08:04][snorts] But again, how do we connect to each other? No one has phone lines anymore, and connecting the modern web is terrible for security. And compatibility layers kind of work, but they're really clunky and just not fun at all.

[00:08:19]But then in 2020, or first, we're like, what if we made a really big LAN? This would be ideal. We just have a LAN that everyone can connect to. Plug your retro devices in and it just works like a big LAN party.

[00:08:33]but we don't have to leave the house.

[00:08:35]And then life happened and we never got around to doing it until 2025. Wireguard actually got invented in 2020, which is really nice for doing really easy VPNs.

[00:08:48]And then also OpenWRT just kind of came back from the dead and started supporting tons and tons of devices.

[00:08:54]Shout out to OpenWT who actually loaned me a lovely router today so I can have this talk because my laptop can't connect to the Wi-Fi for some reason. go buy one of their routers. They're really nice. I have one in my workshop.

[00:09:06]Um, oh, there you go. I added this like literally yesterday, so I forgot about it.

[00:09:12]And then originally I had this little guy. I used this with OpenWRT in like 2011 to 2013 cuz I just needed something that was better than my cable modem that I could use and wouldn't crash it when I downloaded Linux ISOs.

[00:09:25]Yes, many Linux ISOs every week. 30 minute Linux ISOs. [laughter] And also sometimes 90minute Linux ISOs because yeah, if you did that on your cable modem that your ISP gave you, the routing table would fill up and it would just crash, which I guess is a great deterrent. Just give them crappy hardware.

[00:09:44]And this thing was dirt cheap. It was like $30.

[00:09:47]But it's now no longer supported because it had 4 megabytes of flash and 16 megabytes of RAM.

[00:09:53]Then after some searching, we found this little guy from GLET. They call it the Shadow. It has 16 meg of flash and 128 megs of RAM. It can run open WRT and also it can run WireGuard. So then we had the thought of okay what if we treated it like a modem and just put WireGuard and then we had WireGuard on both ends and they would talk to each other over the real internet.

[00:10:20]Okay, so we have a LAN between two computers.

[00:10:23]We have two of them.

[00:10:26]What if we add a third computer?

[00:10:29]>> Let's add a server so we can play video games because everyone likes video games.

[00:10:34]And then 6 months later, >> we had a lot more people cuz it turns out people are really into this idea.

[00:10:41]And then if you look, you remember this lovely little thing where our panet looked like this and then looked like this. You go from Dece September to December kind of looks like what we had.

[00:10:53]And then later on, about a year later, now it does kind of look a bit like this. We have a server in Oregon. We have a server in Virginia. We have a server in Poland that users connect to depending on where they're closest to for latency reasons. It's sort of like a hub and spoke.

[00:11:08]So, we have lots of computers across the world and they can all talk to each other. They can share information, but that's not really the internet yet.

[00:11:14]Still more pieces to this lovely jigsaw.

[00:11:16]So, now we get to everyone's favorite thing, DNS.

[00:11:21]Everyone loves DNS. violently loves DNS.

[00:11:26]So, normally if you want to connect to each other, they say, "Oh, just put, you know, if you're trying to access an old game, they say go into your host file, change this line, put this custom IP address in there to say X goes to Y."

[00:11:39]That's not really scalable when you have like 20, 30, 100 people, and you're like, "We all want to play Starcraft.

[00:11:45]100 people go and open Notepad."

[00:11:49]So if you use the comp global hyper megaet you might notice we have a custom domain we have retro because we have DNS we can do whatever we like we can have custom domains we can override old domains it makes things really easy so we can make our own TLDDS so we have retro and combable hyperagonet for internal stuff we also have furrytail they're over there everyone give them a wave Go check out their thing. They're doing all the phone stuff. We also have Chanette who she has run retro stuff for like 20 years. She's running a AIM replacement server on actual Sun Spark machines. It's really cool. And then eventually we'll have Mac where another member is setting up Mac specific services all running on Xserves, the old Power PC machines.

[00:12:41]And yes, you can have your own TLD. Like if you run on your own DNS server, we will just point at it and say yes, this is the DNS server for whoever, whatever you want to do with it.

[00:12:54]And because we have DNS, we can do fun things where we call it DNS poisoning.

[00:13:00]So DNS on the real internet kind of looks like this. You know, where can I connect to AIM? And your ISP's DNS will say that doesn't exist anymore because AIM has been dead for like 10 years.

[00:13:11]But normally I say just add it to your host file. But again, uh getting a 100 people to do this every time they want to access a website is not really scalable.

[00:13:21]So doesn't scale. And there are other retro projects like Insignia that emulates the original Xbox Live from like 2001. There's Wimy that does the same with the Nintendo Wii. Its Wi-Fi ser or its online servers got discontinued years ago. And they just say connect to our DNS. We'll do all of it. and we have our own DNS server. So what if we just lie to you and say, "Yeah, we have that IP address." So you say, "Where can I find AM?" Well, it's on 1.2.3.4 and yeah, that just kind of works.

[00:13:58]So we have things like a Steam emulation server from November 2004.

[00:14:03]We have AOL, which again, it just works.

[00:14:07]And we have Runescape, which we got recently working because everyone liked Runescape. We have both the original MS Paint version and the 2004 version that now people call old school, which is weird to me.

[00:14:20]But not everything just works.

[00:14:22]If you are of a certain age, you might know about NAT [clears throat] or when we started adding routers to home internet connections.

[00:14:31]So back in the day, you had a computer, I had a computer, they would just talk to each other with their IP address.

[00:14:37]sort of like how the network initially worked and that kind of created a lot of assumptions about how networks at scale work on the internet at least in the 90s.

[00:14:48]So you'd have me and Thomas. We're talking to the AIM server. That's the third computer as it were. And I'd say I want to send them a file. And the server would say, "Open the connection to this IP and this port." That way I could send the file directly to them. AIM or whoever doesn't have to pay for bandwidth for me to send files around for those totally legal Napster MP3s that I had.

[00:15:13][clears throat] So that works. It just directly sends a file. Everybody's happy.

[00:15:18]But then if we enter a router, well, the router doesn't know who to talk to because it has a bunch of machines sitting behind it.

[00:15:26]So, this kind of broke a lot of things, but also was kind of helpful, which is going to make a lot of network admins really angry because it basically acts as a firewall of sorts. So, if you may remember Blaster, one of the lovely Windows XP worms that went around in the early 2000s, it would just scan for open networks. It would say, uh, all right, you go for any network admins.

[00:15:53]I made this slide and then there someone commented that, so I had to add that. So yeah, this would connect to open Windows 2000, Windows XP machines and just send malware to replicate itself. And because there's no firewall, there's no way for it to deny the connection. It would just be like, okay. And then it would get infected. But then you add a router, it just doesn't know cuz port 135 is not forwarded to any machine on the network.

[00:16:20]So kind of unintentionally active as a firewall, but also it broke a lot of programs. And it does break a lot of programs on the retro network. Like you [clears throat] can't use Lime Wire. We don't have Lime Wire, but this would have been another program in the early 2000s that did not work properly unless you port forwarded. Video games wouldn't work because one player would be the host. Other players would try to connect to it. That is actually a problem we still have today because VMware for some reason drops incoming connections, which actually broke my demo. So, we'll get to that in a little while. And then if you had an Xbox, you could do a lot of fun things actually with NAT.

[00:16:58]But again, it would say who's the fastest internet connection, you're going to be the game host. So Microsoft doesn't have to pay for hosting servers for video games. And then finally, FTP where you connect to the FTP server and it says, "Okay, let me connect back to you." Unless you're using pass mode, which only came out in like the early 2000s.

[00:17:18]It's a really terrible protocol from the 1970s, but it breaks if you have NAT.

[00:17:23]And digging up these kind of old problems is just fascinating and infuriating, but these are the fun things that happen. So, technically, it would have been historically correct if everyone gets an IP address and you can just connect, but that would also mean that if you downloaded an old piece of malware unintentionally or otherwise, you could infect the whole network and that would be bad.

[00:17:46]So unfortunately we have to compromise and this was a long full-out discussion over like weeks with the staff. So ultimately we're going to use openwrt.

[00:17:59]We have a setup script that sets up wire guard asks for your keys. It gives you an IP address. It does all the fun things in the background because it's a lot of just typing in commands otherwise.

[00:18:09][clears throat] So by default you get a firewall.

[00:18:13]Incoming connections are firewall. You can turn it off if you want to. Probably not a good idea depending on what you want to do with the network.

[00:18:21]And before people ask, it is not connected to the real internet. It is a private network. You get a router like this one. We give you 253 IP addresses.

[00:18:32]You can connect whatever you want with them. Real devices, VMs, whatever you have. And then you can only talk with other devices on the retro network because again putting stuff on the real internet is a really bad idea. It's really insecure. So we have a bunch of clients. We have like 90 users. We have servers, game servers and other websites and things. They're all serving stuff.

[00:18:54]They're across the planet. And we even have our own DNS.

[00:18:58]That kind of sounds like how the internet works at a very basic rudimentary level functionally.

[00:19:05]So, how do you join?

[00:19:08]Well, it's actually easier than most people probably expect. You just need some old computers or virtual machines.

[00:19:15]For this demo, I'm going to be using some virtual machines. So, don't worry.

[00:19:18]And then you just need something that can run Linux for WireGuard. Either virtual machine or hardware. Windows will not work. Mac will not work. The BSDs work, but I don't know anyone who's used freeBSD wire guard, so I can't comment.

[00:19:34]But yeah, if you have an old Raspberry Pi, it'll work. If you buy the $30 GLET, it works. If you have a Proxmox VM, OpenWRT supports that. It also supports VMware and Virtual Box, whatever virtualization you use is supported.

[00:19:49]And then again, [clears throat] you can just connect and do cool stuff. It's free to connect, free to use.

[00:19:56]And again, 253 IPs. I can hook up as much stuff as you have because it's a retro network. We have effectively the whole IPv4 space available.

[00:20:06]So, what can you do with it? It's the old internet. You can do anything you want with it. The point is for it to be fun again. Like, there's no, "Oh, well, I want to do this." Okay, go do it. Go run a blog. Go run a game server.

[00:20:20][clears throat] Do things that make you happy and build things that give you joy. There are two rules, though. Number one, no fascists.

[00:20:28]>> There are unfortunately a lot of fascists in retro computing. That's another topic you can ask me about after the talk, but no, they're not allowed.

[00:20:36]>> Hell yeah.

[00:20:36]>> And two, you're going to build things that make you happy. Don't do things that make you unhappy. We have the modern web for that. You can go on Twitter. You can go be unhappy on Twitter. Go here to be happy and do things that make you happy.

[00:20:49]>> And again, we're just a network. You make it fun. You do the things. This isn't like a theme park where you come and go like, "Okay, well, what are the rides that I can ride on?" It's more like a big open plot of land where you say, "I'm going to build a house. I'm going to run things and do things with it."

[00:21:06]All right. Now, I have a demo that kind of works.

[00:21:09]So, bear with me because it's also really laggy now.

[00:21:13]So, I have a lovely Proxmox machine here.

[00:21:20]So, this is running on my little workshop down in Everett, and it is connected to the retro network. And I'm going to boot up this lovely machine here, >> which takes a hot minute because Windows XP is slow. So, bear with me.

[00:21:33]>> Not even connecting to the >> Not even what?

[00:21:36]>> Not even Google.

[00:21:39]>> I mean, I can load up Google. If people want to see it, This is how you know it's an authentic experience, by the way, because even on a modern framework laptop with an SSD, Windows XP is still pig slow.

[00:22:01]>> All right. Log in.

[00:22:04]>> Yeah.

[00:22:07]>> Play the sound.

[00:22:08]>> Oh, it didn't like that.

[00:22:11]>> We didn't hear the sound. It played it, but it was very quiet.

[00:22:15]>> I think it's I've got the sound turned down in the VM.

[00:22:21]Let's crank that because I'm going to need sound.

[00:22:24]This is also really laggy.

[00:22:29]So, there's Steam running in the background because it just auto starts.

[00:22:34]>> Oh, that that's okay. That's why you couldn't hear anything.

[00:22:39]>> Yeah, we need you to log back in so we can [laughter] Oh, and we also have aim, which again, it just starts and runs.

[00:22:49]But for this test, we're going to do actually to make Hayden happy, I'll show you Google. Retro. So, some of you may have seen a YouTube video I did about six months ago where I pulled apart one of those old Google search appliances, those big bright yellow Google servers.

[00:23:08]Turns out it just runs CentOS and with a bit of Kajoling you can put that into a virtual machine and then you can have a retro Google search engine internally which you can look up things.

[00:23:21]So if I look up company global hyperet there's a bunch of results.

[00:23:28]So there's other people who like Jill, she has a ton of stuff on the retro network running on actual open BSD 3.0.

[00:23:34]She's not cheating like I am.

[00:23:39]Mhm.

[00:23:40]>> I did try the weather one downstairs in the demo, but that apparently crashes uh Firefox 3.6, but that was the one she wanted me to show off. So, I let her know and hopefully she'll get that fixed. All right, so the main demo that I wanted to show is Starcraft because everyone likes Starcraft in 1998.

[00:24:00]>> Uh, where is it in my list? This is really hard.

[00:24:04]>> Spoke.

[00:24:07]Quake on this.

[00:24:09]>> Of course it's Quake on this. [laughter] >> There's also a lot of lag in this. Like >> the original Starcraft campaign.

[00:24:18]>> Oh, give me one second. I need to give it a CD. Thankfully, we have a totally legit CD. [laughter] Uh, where did I put it?

[00:24:30]Brood War.

[00:24:35]Make sure that >> and then okay Windows >> that >> and then it just opens anyway [laughter] Windows XP. I love Windows XP so much.

[00:24:52]So we go here we have Battlelet but again we're just going to pretend we are Battlelet so we can connect and it just >> is totally cool with it.

[00:25:03]So, if I log in, >> welcome to Starcraft Battleet.

[00:25:08]>> Except now it has a custom little thing because it's running PVPGN, which is a lovely piece of server emulation software written 25 years ago that probably could use people to clean it up if anyone would like to ever look at that. So, I'll join this game, which is running on the Proxmox machine.

[00:25:24]And then if I hit okay on Proxmox, It was really laggy, but we are in a game together. So, I have one at the top of the map and then one down the bottom.

[00:25:42]And I could probably send them to each other, but Oh, this is unplayably laggy.

[00:25:47][laughter] >> Yeah. This week where we just >> It's not the most impressive demo, but this took like days to figure out because VMware is terrible and would just drop incoming packets. So, I couldn't get it to host.

[00:26:04]>> Thanks, Broad.

[00:26:05]>> Yep.

[00:26:11]>> But after I left Oh, it's a draw now.

[00:26:13]even though I quit, which technically should mean that I surrendered. But all right, so yeah, that's just one of the many apps we have. People really like games, so I've just been adding a lot of game servers. I'll really quickly demo Runescape because that one was formative for people.

[00:26:36]This one has had a lot of people downstairs like in where I had the little demo booth like just getting sucked in and playing it.

[00:26:43]Oops.

[00:26:46]Escape.

[00:26:53]Also, Windows XP has great sound emulation in VMware.

[00:27:05]>> So, I could just test this with any account name and it just works.

[00:27:10]But we have Runescape and you can click around and do things.

[00:27:13]And it is Oh, it is incredibly laggy doing this in a VM.

[00:27:25]I'm not going to play this for long because it is really difficult to play with a the delay between like a capture and then a broadcast of that capture.

[00:27:39]So, yeah, we have lots of games, lots of websites, and other fun things to do.

[00:27:43]All right. So, originally I was going to say this isn't sponsored by my employer because they wanted that included.

[00:27:49]>> Then they fired me. So, that was fun.

[00:27:51]That is why I don't go to Breton anymore.

[00:27:54]>> Oh, really?

[00:27:55]>> Yes. So, that was fun.

[00:27:57]>> If you'd like to help out, there are links you can give me money or you can ask me after this in case they don't read. Or if you want to get involved, there is my mastadon. There is the Discord that we have the retro network in and I also have the website if you'd like to get signed up. Otherwise, I can be found out of the DMA space. DMA is a hacker space in Seattle and they graciously agreed to sponsor me being here. They also kind of let me just kind of hang out next to them. So, that's been nice.

[00:28:24]Again, [clears throat] that's it. So, any questions so far?

[00:28:29]you sir all the the server code like the Runescape server and the Starcraft you did mention the Starcraft one is already 25 years old how did you get all that source code I didn't realize it was available >> uh so there was a lot of retro projects that are just already emulating this stuff like the game client is a re-implementation Runescape was originally written in Java someone rewrote it in C and they just call it client 3 it's on GitHub so the actual server back end is formerly known as 2004cape, but for legal reasons changed their name to Lost City RS, and they emulate Runescape 2 as of May 2004, like that update, the very first launch version of the game. uh Starcraft, which also supports all the Battleet games from Diablo II up to Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne. If anyone would like to play Dota sometime, like old Dota, uh that one runs on PVPGN, which was written 25 years ago, I'm told because Diablo II shipped with the Battleet symbols included, they just reverse engineered that. And it also supports Westwood online. If anyone likes Command and Conquer, we have everything up to Yuri's Revenge. It kind of works. It's a bit buggy because the software has not been updated in 25 years.

[00:29:48]But yeah, a lot of the stuff we run is just retro emulation projects, but the network itself is just bringing all of that into one big umbrella where people can go and do things instead of being scattered about.

[00:29:59]>> Yes.

[00:29:59]>> Are you still involved in any planetarium or astronomy type?

[00:30:03]>> No. Activities?

[00:30:05]>> I was only there for like a couple months.

[00:30:08]>> You sir, >> how does network work? like is creating a encrypted tunnel.

[00:30:14]>> Yes. So open >> you get a device of choice. I'm just using this as an example. Uh on it is running wire guard. So as far as your device is concerned everything it's just seeing a modem. It just says hi here's your IP address. Here's a gateway.

[00:30:31]Here's DNS.

[00:30:32]And then the only devices it can see are other devices that are connected on this wire guard together. So everyone on the west coast connects to the server in Oregon and then that server is also bridged to one in Virginia and one in Poland. So that way we can tra we can take advantage of lower latency between data centers versus sketchy residential ISPs.

[00:30:54]But yeah, it's just wireguard under the hood which is really nice because it works on most things and people that are better than me at networking are like oh I've got this running on my microtic.

[00:31:03]I've got this running on my UniFi. So they can have their retro network and home network sitting together, which I don't endorse for security reasons, but they like doing it. So I'm like, okay, you're on your own. Serious civil.

[00:31:16]>> Yep. Um, are you considering doing like BGP for the backbone routing as far as like the uh to the data centers connecting to one another?

[00:31:25]>> Uh, not at the moment. Right now, just to make things easy, it's like US- West cgm.org, US East, and then Europe. Okay.

[00:31:34]>> Yeah. Just so people know like, okay, I'm connecting to this server in this location and eventually we will have a signup page where you can just go, you know, I would like this username. We will give you a flash a flashable copy of OpenWRT that you can just load on a Raspberry Pi or whatever device you have and it'll have all your details preconfigured. [clears throat] I was hoping we'd have that ready for this talk, but we didn't get it ready in time, so I left it out. But it will be coming soon. It'll make things a lot easier. But no, we don't have BGP yet. I don't know if we're going to implement that. That would be a question for Snap because he knows way more about networking than I do.

[00:32:10]>> I'll drop my Discord.

[00:32:11]>> Hi.

[00:32:12]>> Uh, is your retro Google actively indexing the retro network?

[00:32:18]>> Kind of. So, the Google search appliance was originally designed for companies who have like tons of different document repos that you could just be like, "Here employee, you know how to use Google.

[00:32:30]Google for stuff internal to our company. So it has a limit of 500,000 pages that it can index and it doesn't understand PHP very well. So someone set up a forum and it's like every page is like PHP ID equals 1 2 3 4 and the Google server just keeps incrementing that. So, it's just filled up 500,000 pages that don't exist. And then it tells us, "Hey, contact your Google support vendor. Please buy a bigger license," which Google killed that product in 2019, and we never paid for it anyway.

[00:33:03]>> So, sorry to interrupt, but uh we only have time for one more question.

[00:33:07]>> Okay.

[00:33:08]>> Hi.

[00:33:09]>> So, uh what happens if you do put something like a Windows XP or Windows 95 machine out on the public?

[00:33:17]still uh >> uh the last time I did it, the last time I did it, and this probably dating myself, this would have been like early 2010s, before it had finished checking for updates on Windows update, it got hit with configure, >> which was fun, but uh these days, Windows XP, I think, is old enough that it's difficult to just get driveby malware. Windows 98. I know someone's done like a video series where they just plug it in and just wait 24 hours. Uh most of these are so old that it's difficult to just get things from existing and not doing anything like not going to weird websites or anything like that. But it's more of a you probably shouldn't do this just as a matter of course especially because then it is a machine on your home network that can be used to pivot to do actual nefarious things. So, it's more of a hygiene thing that uh we have documented cases of this is what will happen in this amount of time.

[00:34:15]All right. Uh I'm out of time, I'm told.

[00:34:17]>> Yeah. Um just a network uh problem we're having. So >> Oh, okay.

[00:34:21]>> Um and I think we're um >> slightly over time, but I started with >> a bit over time, but that's fine.

[00:34:27]>> All right. If y'all have more question, [applause] if y'all have more questions, I'm down at the DMA table. I also am right by the OpenWRT people who you should buy one of these lovely routers from. They asked me to say that because yeah, they're really good routers and they graciously agreed to loan me one.

[00:34:52]>> That's awesome.

[00:34:52]>> Got that Discord CR pulled up.

[00:34:54]>> I can get it. Oh, there we go.

[00:34:59]Thank you.

[00:34:59]>> Mhm.

[00:35:05]>> You can also get it from me downstairs.

[00:35:07]>> Oh, yeah.

[00:35:09]>> Cool. Thank you.

[00:35:17]>> Mhm.

[00:35:18]>> So, do this. Thank you.

[00:35:20]>> Absolutely. Thank you.

[00:35:23]>> Yeah. If you if you can't get it, I'm downstairs question. Sure. Guessing by the name of VM of VMware you don't like it. Is there something you would recommend over it?

[00:35:33]>> Uh not really. That's a whole other I guess it could be a whole other talk >> cuz I don't exactly have a window something that I have a relatively modern.

[00:35:43]>> That is fair.

[00:35:44]>> So you can do DOS box and all.

[00:35:47]>> Yeah, >> that will run well enough for a lot of like up to Windows 98. Yeah, you can run 98 in dossbox which will give you a voodoo 3 which gets you up to about the turn of the millennium.

[00:35:59]>> Like you can run Starcraft very easily in that setup, but you won't be running like stuff like Halfife 2 will not run in D.

[00:36:06]>> I kind of don't want to run Halfife 2.

[00:36:08]>> Yes, that you probably the best option is probably bare metal because >> and I could make a whole talk out of this. lot of the >> virtualization is great for commercial applications cuz that's what they've designed it for, but running games is just kind of a happy accident.

[00:36:24]>> There is a terrible strategy.

[00:36:27]>> What?

[00:36:27]>> It's Windows Server 2008.

[00:36:29]>> Oh no, >> cuz it supports remote uh graphics cards on Windows XP.

[00:36:36]>> I haven't tried that, but that might work. But like the short answer is >> Proxmox does not have any graphics acceleration. Virtual Box deleted their support because it apparently had an unfixable exploit. So anything below anything before I think Windows 7, they just don't support accelerating anymore.

[00:36:56]VMware works and works pretty [clears throat] well for like DirectX9.

[00:37:00]So it'll run Halfife 2, but you can't do things like running a game server. It just drops network packets for some reason.

[00:37:06]>> Wonderful.

[00:37:07]>> Yes.

[00:37:08]>> So it's a whole big mess. And then there's other projects like 86 box which is sort of like the beastness of emulation where it will run but it is cycle accurate is emulating the physical transistors in a CPU.

[00:37:22]>> So my Ryzen 5600X at home which is a bit old but still competent.

[00:37:28]>> Yeah.

[00:37:28]>> Can barely run a Pentium 200 MHz at full speed >> because it's it's physically simulating.

[00:37:35]>> So it is the most accurate emulator quote unquote >> but that hurts it when you leave. And I question why they need that from their you're emulating x86 on x86.

[00:37:46]>> Like if you're running an Apple silicon Mac, sure that's ARM. That makes more sense.

[00:37:50]>> But it's not my project. So not my circus, not my monkeys kind of thing.

[00:37:54]>> Yeah.

[00:37:56]>> I'm Yeah, >> I I could do a whole separate talk on emulation sucks because I've had arguments with people are not retro.

[00:38:03]People are like, "Why do you have all this old hardware? Just run it in emulators." And I tell them because PC emulation is like nestical. It is so inaccurate and so buggy. It is a bad time.

[00:38:13]>> Yeah.

[00:38:14]>> Hello. Uh, can I take over the HDMI slot for a second? I need to see if my Yeah.

[00:38:18]>> thing is going to work later.

[00:38:20]>> I mean, my talk is over, so yes.

[00:38:21]>> Okay.

[00:38:24]Okay.