I think I used ZMODEM to pull a core dump off a McData FC switch a couple years ago. Used the core dump to recover the password for the switch.
ZMODEM
51–60 of 103 posts
Re: ZMODEM
#52I miss the days of ZModem and YModem.
Re: ZMODEM
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did put "open source" in quotes for that reason. At the time, it what somewhat novel to be able to get the source code at all, and even more novel that the writers would accept code from end users to put back into the product.
>At the time, it what somewhat novel to be able to get the source code at all Really? IIRC, in Jason Scott's excellent BBS documentary (you should go watch it. Like, right now. It's that good), Thom Henderson (from SEA. Remember them? I don't, because I wasn't alive. Which is why I have to rely on documentaries) said that it was expected in UNIX circles, which is where Kermit originated. Or were you on PC? I don't kn…
Link to BBS documentary :
Re: ZMODEM
#54Who remembers IceZmodem? A backwards compatible protocol that allowed you to play Tetris or listen to .MOD files while downloading... and if you were downloading from an IceZmodem capable host, you'd even get increased download speeds! http://textfiles.com/computers/DOCUMENTATION/izm-q&a.txt
I remember this - so awesome. I seem to remember the Sysop could break in and chat with you too.
Re: ZMODEM
#55It's still hard to match the convenience of moving files to and from a server with RZ/SZ. If your terminal emulator supports it, it will see the trigger sequence emitted and start the modem protocol over your ssh connection and save the file. Since it runs over your current ssh connection it's perfectly secure. It's so much easier then switching to a local terminal to use scp to get or put a local file. Sure, I know…
I agree ... I forget to do this these days but in relatively modern days I used to use sz/rz all the time ... circa 2000-2004 I guess ...
I still use sz/rz on an almost daily basis, for doing embedded system development. The system I work with is only accessible over UART, so rz/sz is the only way to transfer files to the host PC (well, the only convenient way; the other way is through JTAG, which is a PITA, and only useful for imaging, not just transferring some small data file from the running system).
Re: ZMODEM
#56Looking b ack at stuff like Zmodem, it's instructive to compare the computing culture then and now. Back then, everything was so cryptic . Documentation was hard to find printed books, code and config was extremely abbreviated ( sometimes for legitimate technical reasons of storage capacity). It was all very off-putting unless you put w lot of effort into research, or ran in the social circles that already had data a…
The most striking thing to me was there was a huge amount of free-as-in-beer software powering the entire BBS "network" and lots of helpful communities but almost nothing was open source.
From what I could tell, it took a long time for the academic tradition of making the source available to work its way into the non-academic world. The academics were using UNIX and other mainframe/minicomputer systems, but non-academics at home didn't have much access to this stuff unless they got themselves an account somewhere they could access through modem. So everyone else was "raised" in the PC tradition, which came from MS-DOS and the 8-bit micros before it. There, there was a bunch of "shareware" and a bunch of freeware available on BBSes, but the whole idea of passing around source code so everyone could benefit or make modifications just hadn't even come up. I grew up on BBSes and the idea of having source code just never even occurred to me honestly, until I started hearing about it when Linux became popular in the early 90s. The first real open-source stuff (which was really Free software), which pushed it as a philosophy, had to be from RMS and his GNU project, but I never even heard of that until Linux came along, and I think it was mostly confined to the insular academic world before this. When Linux came along, the GNU project finally had a kernel and could be put together into an actual working OS, and at the very same time, the internet was really catching on outside the academic world (this is about 1992 remember), and the WWW was only a couple years away. I'd say it was the perfect trifecta: the already-existing GNU software and tools (glibc, gcc, etc. are really important for having a working OS and building stuff), the Linux kernel, and the new-found accessibility of the internet allowing global communication and collaboration.
Re: ZMODEM
#57This immediately reminded me of GIFLink. It was a layer over protocols like zmodem that rendered images as they downloaded. Think of that for a second. Modems were so slow that you could watch the image line by line render to decide if you wanted to continue on with the download. Yes they were porn images.
I remember the "porn" images from the BBS days. They were pretty laughable really, usually just pictures of naked women, frequently showing only their bare breasts and obscuring the rest. I think they were frequently just scans from Playboy, which was rather tame.
Compare to these days, where there's all kinds of crazy hard-core stuff available for free with a quick Bing search, in both still-photo and video.
Re: ZMODEM
#58I remember when we did our own zmodem implementation so we could bypass download limits. Large BBS' at the time had restrictions on how many KB you could download in a day, but they only counted completed file transfers. ZModem had a provision for restarting failed transfers, so it was normal for a transfer to fail before completion (call waiting!) and the user to come back later to finish it. Our implementation coul…
Leech zmodem, scourge of the 713.
Re: ZMODEM
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
>At the time, it what somewhat novel to be able to get the source code at all Really? IIRC, in Jason Scott's excellent BBS documentary (you should go watch it. Like, right now. It's that good), Thom Henderson (from SEA. Remember them? I don't, because I wasn't alive. Which is why I have to rely on documentaries) said that it was expected in UNIX circles, which is where Kermit originated. Or were you on PC? I don't kn…
Link to BBS documentary : https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary
Thanks. Many memories of acoustic-coupler time spent on Compuserve and local BBSes.
Re: ZMODEM
#60> Introduced 1986; 30 years ago Now I feel old. I remember when this was new and clever. Made downloading from BBS's much nicer over XModem. At 2400 baud or whatever was current then!
There were a bunch of different something-Modems around that time that fiddled around with window sizes, retransmission approaches, batch transmission, and so forth. In case anyone is wondering, there was a YModem (also developed by Forsberg) in addition to XModem and ZModem along with various variants. I even interned for a small company one summer that implemented one of these for a timesharing service using Prime…
I really liked HSLink, since you could both upload and download at the same time.