VOGONS


First post, by s0ren

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I have four Windows 98 boxes for multiplayer games. As I do not want to expose them to the dangers of the real internet (if IE5 and FF1 could even render most of the current web pages correctly), I have made an isolated network only for these computers. On this network i have only a switch and a Raspberry Pi 3 that act as DHCP server. To give some sort of internet, and to easily transfer files to the computers, I also installed a DNS server and Apache2 web server. Basically the DNS server resolves all domains to point at the Raspberry Pi's own web server which makes it possible to do like this:
8U0PKKx.jpg

This is not an old photo, its archive.org's archived version of yahoo.com from mid 1997. Besides this internet emulation gimmick, i have made the domain http://www.download.com point to a folder on the Raspberry Pi's SD card where i have files i wish to transfer to my Windows 98 boxes. The DHCP and DNS servers of the Pi are only enabled for eth0 (the cabled network), and the wifi module of the Pi is connected to my regular home network. In that way i can easily transfer files via SFTP to the Pi/Win98 boxes, provide fake nostalgic internet, and shield the Win98 boxes from the dangerous internet.

Here is how i did:
Equipment: Network switch and Raspberry Pi 3 (a Pi 1 or 2 could also work but with some limitations unless you have a wifi dongle)
Raspberry pi software: Raspbian Jessie Lite (no GUI needed)
Computer software: FileZilla and PuTTY

Install Raspbian lite on the SD card. The default username is "pi" and the default password is "raspberry"
Enable SSH in the config program by running "sudo raspi-config" for easy management and file transfer later on
First, specify the IP address of the Raspberry Pi's wired network to be 192.168.0.1 by running "sudo nano /etc/dhcpcd.conf" and add the following at the bottom of the file:

interface eth0
static ip_address=192.168.0.1/24
static routers=192.168.0.1
static domain_name_servers=192.168.0.1

Install isc-dhcp-server by running "server apt-get install isc-dhcp-server".
Run "sudo nano /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf" to edit the DHCP config file. The following example config file will make the DHCP server only run on your wired network which your retro computers will use (this is important so that you do not mess up your main home network) and use 192.168.0.1 as the DHCP server IP, with connected computers getting IP addresses from 192.168.0.2 to 192.168.0.255

DHCPDARGS=eth0;
ddns-update-style none;
option domain-name "retronet";
option domain-name-servers 192.168.0.1;
default-lease-time 600;
max-lease-time 7200;
log-facility local7;
subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 192.168.0.2 192.168.0.255;
}

Install the DNS server by running "sudo apt-get install dnsmasq"
Run "sudo nano /etc/dnsmasq.conf" to edit dnsmasq to forward DNS requests to your own web server. The following config lines will forward all .com, .org and .net domain requests made by your retro computers (for instance http://www.yahoo.com)

address=/net/192.168.0.1
address=/com/192.168.0.1
address=/org/192.168.0.1

Configure your Pi to connect to your wifi by typing "sudo nano /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf". Add the following at the bottom (modified to your settings of course):

network={
ssid="nameofnetwork"
psk="password"
}

Install Apache2 by running "sudo apt-get install apache2"
If you want to use PHP for more interactive fake internet pages, run "sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5"
Run "sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf" and replace the contents of the file with for instance:

<VirtualHost www.yahoo.com>
DocumentRoot /var/www/yahoo
</VirtualHost>

This will make all requests for http://www.yahoo.com redirect to the webpage you have stored on the Raspberry Pi in the folder /var/www/yahoo. You can add as many VirtualHosts nodes as you want to emulate more web sites. The first entry in this config file will be the default website of your server, which will be resolved if you request a website for which you have no virtual host.
Type "sudo reboot" to reboot your Raspberry Pi, and hopefully everything will be up and running afterwards. Your connected retro computers should automatically get an IP address (if they use TCP/IP) and you can browse your emulated internet using Internet Explorer or Netscape. If you want to add more websites to your emulated internet, connect to the Pi using PuTTY (use the wifi IP of your Pi) and edit 000-default.conf.
In FileZilla, open "File" -> "Site manager" -> "New Site" and connect to your Pi's wifi IP using the SFTP protocol. Here you can upload files to your emulated internet web sites, which can then be downloaded through your retro computers browsers.

Reply 1 of 7, by leileilol

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Will this method sacrifice the Pi's own internet connectivity?

What about fetching from IA in the most appropriate way? I.e. forwarding requests for whatever.example.com to web.archive.org/web/1997id_/http://whatever.example.com and giving that to the incoming connection (where it'll also hopefully automatically resolve absolute urls), and just do a real 404 on any IA 404?

What about limiting connection speed to 28.8k? 😀

apsosig.png
long live PCem

Reply 2 of 7, by s0ren

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The Pi is on your regular wifi network and has internet connectivity. It should be possible to make it act like a proxy to IA but you need to resolve from the correct approximate date and strip some IA headers. That should also slow down the connection considerably 😀

Reply 3 of 7, by leileilol

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That's what adding the id_ prefix in the url's for. It sends the original, unadulterated page. No Javascript header injections, no url corrections, no additional comments, no nothing. It's all as-is.

apsosig.png
long live PCem

Reply 4 of 7, by s0ren

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I didnt know that was possible 😀 Its good for getting the pure HTML, then the images can be snagged from the modified version of the pages

Reply 5 of 7, by kralost

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Awesome! I was looking for doing exactly this. Everything worked except setting up the static IP address on the new version of Raspberry Pi OS, which now uses network manager.
So only the step one changes, as " /etc/dhcpcd.conf" doesn't exist because of this (and creating it doesn't solve the problem).
Instead of that, follow these steps:

1. Write on a terminal the following to see connections:
nmcli con show

2. Edit the eth connection by the name shown in the previous step (this will open a cli tool):
sudo nmcli con edit "connection name"

3. Set a static IP, save and quit:
nmcli> set ipv4.addresses 192.168.0.1/24
nmcli> save
nmcli> quit

And the rest remains the same.

Reply 6 of 7, by midicollector

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I was thinking of doing exactly this! Except I wanted to get as much of the internet from a single year (96? 97?) as possible. It’d be cool if someone did a whole package with all the stuff to run it already configured plus all the web pages from a specific year that archive.org has, so you could just dump it onto a raspberry pi and have retro internet.

Reply 7 of 7, by superfury

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midicollector wrote on 2023-10-24, 20:43:

I was thinking of doing exactly this! Except I wanted to get as much of the internet from a single year (96? 97?) as possible. It’d be cool if someone did a whole package with all the stuff to run it already configured plus all the web pages from a specific year that archive.org has, so you could just dump it onto a raspberry pi and have retro internet.

Doesn't Webone's proxy support that already (or still on TODO)?
UniPCemu can also emulate an dial-up ISP (local network or internet global IPv4/IPv6(using SDL3_net) connectable TCP socket) using a serial port(Dial-up Hayes modem like Dosbox connecting using TCP sockets) as well btw, as well as providing dial-up support (improved but not released yet (it's in source control tho)). UniPCemu supports IPv4, but supports IPX (improved since last release) as well (using SLIP (no drivers exist yet though) or PPP). It can also dial IP addresses by padding the IP-address as 12-digit phone numbers(for example 192168001001 for 192.168.1.1) with ":port" (like :80) added optionally, though simple "0" through "9" for one of the 10 phone book entries like "ATDT0" (or the "S" phonebook option) is also possible. Was planning on making such a MS-DOS PPP SLIP IPX driver, but using existing code bases might not be that easy as I thought.

PPP IPX runs fine in Win9x though (tested using DOS and Win95 Doom). Also supports both IPv4 and IPX simultaneously, but Windows 9x messes up IPX packets if both are used (using wrong encoding of PPP frames, pushing raw IPX or the like over the PPP instead of adding required proper PPP headers)?
Managed to play Win95 doom with 1/2/3 MS-DOS clients though.

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