Amiga Unix Wiki

By default Amix only supports the Commodore A2065 Ethernet adapter. The A2065 has a coaxial and an AUI port, latter to which you can plug an AUI Transceiver for adapting it to RJ45.

With Gateway UNIX CD's drivers the Village Tronic Ariadne I also works. Regarding connectivity it's easier as it has an RJ45 connector already on board. Both boards also have a BNC connector for coaxial 10Base2 ethernet (you'll need the compatible hardware - hubs for connecting 10Base2 and 10BaseT (RJ45) also exist). Old ethernet gear is usually readily available on eBay, but not always for cheap.

During the installation, you are asked if you want to configure network. Same can be done later in amixadm, it will ask you to give IP addresses and host names of the local machine and a remote machine (anything in your local network, this will be put to /etc/hosts). The IP address set here will be the IP address the machine will take during booting.

You can check the status of the network and the currently used IP address with ifconfig aen0

Out of the box, Amiga UNIX doesn't do DNS lookups but looks at local files (/etc/hosts) only. To enable DNS access:

ln -f /usr/lib/libsockdns.so /usr/lib/libsocket.so

mv /etc/netconfig /etc/netconfig.TCP

ln -f /etc/netconfig.DNS /etc/netconfig

If you put your nameserver into /etc/resolv.conf this will get DNS working for at least some applications, like ping. Others such as nslookup appear to expect a nameserver to be running on the local system. To easily configure your system, download the attachments to this page, below. Place named.boot in /etc, and everything else into /var/named. Edit /etc/named.boot and replace the IP address on this line with the DNS server you use for your net connection:

forwarders 192.168.1.1

Then start named by running in.named with no arguments. Edit the file /etc/resolv.conf to contain this line:

nameserver 127.0.0.1

You can verify this is working by using nslookup to find google.com's IP:

nslookup www.google.com
Server:  localhost
Address:  127.0.0.1

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:    www.l.google.com
Address:  74.125.67.147
Aliases:  www.google.com

You've now got DNS working as well as I can get it to work, currently.

The route is set in the file /etc/inet/rc.inet. Assuming your gateway is 192.168.1.1, you need to add the following to this file:

/usr/sbin/route add default 192.168.1.1 1

Don't forget the extra “1” at the end, that's the metric and it's required.

One of the easiest ways to share files between your Amix machine and other machines, is to use an NFS share. It is an old standard and still widely supported (even some modern NAS boxes offer it out-of-the-box).

First you need to have a compatible network card and configured it correctly. Then, create an NFS share on your network. Easiest way is to create it without username/password. Or create an user with identical credentials as your Amix user account. Then on your Amix machine, create a directory where you want the network share to appear (here /home/joe/NFSmount).

On your Amix machine the syntax to mount NFS is: mount -F nfs (IP-address):/(name of the share) /(path where to mount it)

Example: mount -F nfs 192.168.0.68:/amix /home/joe/NFSmount (Where 192.168.0.68 is a machine in the local network that has an NFS share called “amix”)

Now you can access the files as an ordinary local directory. Unmount happens when the system is shutdown, or manually by unmount /home/joe/NFSmount. To have a look of currently mounted file systems (both local and remote), use mount -p.

Notes: some NAS/network gear let you adjust the MTU (maximum transmission unit) to enhance transfer speeds. At least one user reported that raising this value (from the default value of 1500) caused problems with Amix: a mount was possible but any access to files on the NFS share caused “NFS not responding, still trying” errors. Putting back the default value restored operation.

For those interested, there is also a short tutorial on using Amix as a NFS file server

You can remotely log in into the Amix system by using rlogin or telnet and the IP address of the machine: rlogin 192.168.0.44 telnet 192.168.0.44

If backspace doesn't work over the remote session (produces chracaters instead of deleting), fix it by typing stty erase (backspace)

Oh yeah, there's some weirdness for sure. I'll update this once I determine what can be done about named. One thing: leave your domain unset, or set it to “nodomain”. If it is “properly” set, it appends your domain to every lookup request for at least the ping utility. The file to edit is /etc/domain. You can unset your domain without a reboot by executing:

domainname nodomain