This is a dead cheap Orange Pi One (around $20) will act as MacIP gateway for your old macintosh computers. In the old days you had to have a serious router. f.i a FastPath to get on the Internet. Now this tiny “all in one computer”, a so called SoC, can do the trick.
This device has some extra’s like proxies for old browsers, ssl for old email, text browsing and AFP filesharing over DDP. Plain old AppleTalk file sharing
If you don’t have an Orange Pi, have a look at my other project “MacIPgw VM”, a software solution with the same possibilities. If you have a Raspberry Pi have a look at the MacIppi Rpi page.
The MacIPpi will allow you to surf the Internet with your old Macintosh without any problems. Just connect your old Macintosh with a normal LocalTalk bridge, like an Asante AsanteTalk or a Dayna Etherprint to you LAN and startup you MacIPpi. You can also use an old networking Mac with the LocalTalk Bridge control panel to do the work.
You set your Mac with MacTCP on f.i. 172.16.2.2 (anything between 172.16.2.2 and 254, subnet mask 255.255.255.0), as gateway 172.16.2.1 and DNS 8.8.8.8. Or do the same with a TCP/IP control panle, but then choose Connect via: AppleTalk (MacIP) and configure:Using MacIP manually. Same IP information.
Start a TCP/IP kind of program like, Fetch, Telnet or a browser and of you go to the Internet!
So, what do you you have to do to get this up and running:
An Orange Pi Zero 512MB will work too with the same image! Will save you 1 buck…. ($8.99 instead of $9.99 for an OrangePi One),
An Orange Pi Zero 256MB will work too with the same image! Will save you 3 bucks…. ($6.99 instead of $9.99 for an OrangePi One). But 256MB memory is really very little, so I would advice aginst it. I have seen it working , but I need an “endurance test” to be sure….
Orange Pi Zero… really small!
Shipping will take 8 to 14 days.
Download my image from www.macip.net. Current version 4.08
Download image: MacIPpi-V4.08.img ( md5sum: 6e397fc517378a3d79dcd6de93cbb9d2 – file size: 3.7G ) or the 7zipped version ( some 2.0 GB smaller….)
Use dd on Linux systems (and MacOSX) to put the image on the SD disk. This will be a command like this:
dd if=MacIPpi-V4.08.img|pv|dd of=/dev/sdX bs=1M
On a Linux/Unix/MacOSX system you can check the name of the SD card with the command:
dmesg
On Mac/Linux/Windows Etcher or on Windows only you can use a tool like Win32DiskImager (this tool is depricated…but sometimes people work with it). Etcher is THE tool!
Connect you Orange Pi One to the network with a network cable. Do not try to connect the MacIPpi with wifi. No Appletalk over WIFI! It will get an IP address from your home router if you power it on. After a few minutes it will be ready. Take this time because the appletalk daemon needs some time to settle. Even no need to connect a screen. If you want you can login from your Macintosh with Telnet or SSH. You can use IP address 172.16.2.1 to connect. If you want to connect from a Mac OSX, Windows or Linux machine you have to find out the IP address or use a serial console. If you want to login username is: orangepi and password: orangepi
FULL NAT on the MacIP connection. You can now surf the Internet without any router configuration
sshd started at boot. You can login with ssh. User macipgw can login with ssh. Password is also macipgw. If you like to be root login as root or do a sudo su and enter the macipgw user password: macipgw. Or use user orangepi with password orangepi Root password is: orangepi
telnetd started at boot. You can login with telnet. Use user macipgw and password macipgw Or use user orangepi with password orangepi
Host name resolution. You can point to gw.macip.net (or macippi.macip.net) and it is resolved as 172.16.2.1 and you can point to mac.macip.net as your Macintosh with IP address 172.16.2.2. Any IP adres from 1 to 10 is mapped now. So mac.macip.net is 172.16.2.2 (mac02 also). mac03.macip.net is 172.16.2.3, mac04.macip.net is 172.16.2.4, etc
motd updated. You now see a lot of information, like all the Macintosh and AppleTalk devices in your network
Installed nmap for testing
Installed aecho for testing
Installed nbplkup for finding AppleTalk devices
Some more old services are starting up, besides telnetd and ftpd also tftpd, finger are started. Nice for testing old MacTCP applications. For ftp login with the orangepi account with password orangepi. Or anonymous login with user anonymous and any password. The home directory of user orangepi is also accessable from your Chooser.
Web server on port 80 so you can test a web browser. Point it to http://web.macip.net and you will see a page telling you reaches a web page. It is the starting page of the World Wide Web how it was in 1993 at CERN
Testing script ( /bin/appletalk-test) running from crontab to test if your AppleTalk is up and running. You will see a bright red led every minute and flashing red led every 15 seconds if appletalk is working. A continuous red led is shown if your AppleTalk is down. (Won’t work on the Zero) The green light is the power light.
Version file. Now 4.0.8
See the video:
MacIPpi staring up. Watch the red light!
Lynx web browser. Login with telnet user: orangepi and password: orangepi and type the command:
lynx
and you will get the text only web browser so you can surf the web. No support for https however….If you close lynx your shell access will also be closed.
Elinks web browser. Login with telnet user: orangepi and password: orangepi and type the command:
elinks
and you will get the text only web browser so you can surf the web.. And yes… support for https! If you close lynx your shell access will also be closed. If you are logged in you can also type: LineMode, a tribute to the first web browser but on this MacPIpi a link to elinks. See: http://line-mode.cern.ch/www/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
• Add any package you want to add. Use apt install .. or apt-get install .. to install and apt-cache search … to find packages. But be carefull with update. Could break the special kernel. Not tested yet.
• Added versioning file, /etc/macippi-version Current version 4.07
MacIPpi AppleShare File Server
Out of the box AppleShare file sharing with Netatalk 2.2.5 installed. If you open the Chooser you will find the “MacIPpi”. On this server you will find two volumes:
Home Directory MacIPpi DISK
User for the shares is: orangepi with password orangepi
I also put some old Internet Abandonware on the disk so you can start right away with some applications
PROXIES
– HTTP 1.1 to 1.0 proxy – Web Rendering Proxy – stunnel TLS Proxy ( for email clients without SSL)
HTTP 1.1 to 1.0 proxy Starts at boot and listens on port 8082. It allows old web browsers (e.g., Netscape 0.9 or Mosaic) to communicate with modern web servers by inserting the missing “Host:” header. Many sites are hosted now on shared servers. That wasn’t the case in the old days. So one IP address had one web servers. HTTPS is not supported!
Web Rendering Proxy The Web Rendering proxy(WRP) is a HTTP proxy service that renders web pages in to images associated with a clickable image map of the original web links. It basically allows to use historical and obsolete web browsers on the modern web.
WRP version 1.1 is running on port 8080 at startup. For testing a newer version, 1.4, is running on port 8088. And the latest, development version is running on port 8087. All started at boot. It can be interesting to switch now an then to test features. You can also switch if the main proxy has crashed. This can happen. And one drawback, no https support yet.
To start test http://www.park.org/main.html or http://www.apple.com in your old browser. These two sites work perfect.
See it in action below:
stunnel email proxy
The stunnel program is designed to work as TLS encryption wrapper between remote clients and local (inetd-startable) or remote servers. The concept is that having non-TLS aware daemons running on your system you can easily set them up to communicate with clients over secure TLS channels.
stunnel can be used to add TLS functionality to commonly used Inetd daemons like POP-2, POP-3, and IMAP servers, to standalone daemons like NNTP, SMTP and HTTP, and in tunneling PPP over network sockets without changes to the source code.
Ok… I agree…the Lisa is just to show off….a stand for the Powerbook 100…
A contributer of the 68kmla forum gave a very nice user case of the MacIPpi:
It took me a while to get a grip of how Apple stores files and how to get them on to the machine. I am used to Linux and MacOS X and have never heard of AppleDouble. So it took some time to come up with a solution to first use stuffit expand to repack files into Macbin and then have them unbin:ed on the orangepi netatalk AppleShare directory.
Then I simply didn’t understand that MacTCP was a setting and not an application. It took some time until I dragged in to the System folder and then it worked. But setting up IP address with MacTCP requires some patience.
But in the end it worked.
Say hello to google DNS!
(An Apple Iphone 7 taking a photo of its great grand father. I would have thought might have delivered a better result…)
Then onto the topic findin a browser that worked on a Mac Plus with 6.0.7. The number of choices seems to be just one. MacWWW 1.0.3. Not the best browser around. It is not handling much at all actually. It is not very happy with redirects so www.google.com isn’t any good. Most pages are simply too complex. And it crashes as soon as one closes a window.
The apache test page on one of my servers works though.
So in all the mactjaap orangepi works perfectly, almost. But it is not his fault. There seems to be a bug in the Ethernet driver of the kernel which causes it to lose Ethernet connection and spam the log file now and then. Restart is the only way out of it.
Then of course it isn’t very useful since the number of web browsers that are available on 6.0.7 is so limited. Maybe I try to upgrade to system 7 or try to find lynx for system 6.0.7
