Manual · Section 6 of 8

Networking

The Interlan card, TCP/IP, name resolution, and reaching the Internet.

The machine is on the network

It has an Interlan NI1010 Ethernet card, and it uses Research Unix's own TCP/IP — not a modern stack bolted on. That implementation is worth a moment: it is built asstream line disciplines, and its interface is opening a device file and writing a structure to it, which is Plan 9's /net model years before Plan 9. Sockets, as everyone else came to know them, are a different lineage.

/etc/rc brings it all up at boot: the interface, the TCP and UDP disciplines, a default route, and the two shared folders. There is nothing to configure.

Addresses

Address	What it is
`10.0.2.15`	The emulated machine
`10.0.2.2`	Your Mac, from inside
`10.0.2.3`	Name resolution

Traffic leaves through a user-mode network translator, so nothing needs configuring on your Mac, no privileged interface is created, and nothing is exposed to your local network. The emulated machine can reach out; nothing can reach in.

Resolving names

Eighth Edition predates the resolver library, so there is no resolv.conf and nothing that would recognise one. dnsq asks a nameserver directly:

$ dnsq www.tuhs.org
asking 10.0.2.3 for www.tuhs.org (30 byte query)
reply: 70 bytes, id 4b21, rcode 0, 1 question(s), 2 answer(s)
www.tuhs.org has address 50.116.15.146
THE INTERNET IS REACHABLE FROM V8

The first query after boot often times out — it triggers the ARP that carries it. Ask twice.

Connecting to something

telnet is on the machine and works to any host and port:

$ telnet 173.230.156.51 80
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Server: Apache/2.4.68 (Debian)
<address>Apache/2.4.68 (Debian) Server at minnie.tuhs.org Port 80</address>
Connection closed by foreign host.

A 1985 Unix talking to a 2026 web server. The 400 is the interesting part.

That 400 Bad Request is the proof rather than a failure. telnetsends CRLF where a bare CR was typed, so Apache rejected the request — which it could only do having received it. A refused connection looks nothing like a server parsing your request and complaining about it.

The machine at the other end there is minnie.tuhs.org, which is The Unix Heritage Society's own, and a fitting first correspondent for a restored Eighth Edition.

Turning it off

Settings → Machine → Ethernet card removes the card from the emulated computer. This is not a firewall toggle: the hardware is gone, /etc/rc sees no interface, and the machine boots as one that never had networking — which is also exactly how an Eighth Edition machine without an Ethernet board behaved.

Note that shared folders go with it. They travel over the same emulated network, even though they never leave your Mac. See sharing files.

What is not there

There is no web browser, and there will not be one. There is telnet,ftp, rsh, rlogin and the mail system, which is what 1985 had. Modern TLS is far beyond this machine — not in principle, but a VAX-11/780 at five MHz would take a noticeable while over a single handshake.