Reading an AFS / Andrew File System from the 1980s? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / projects

author: dexters_lab
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: July 01, 2017, 01:32:36 pm
content: I recently made a video about my ongoing adventures with my quantel paintboxes where i switched out the SCSI hard disk for an SD card, it got me thinking if there is a way to be able to read the filesystem on the disk...within the machines boot rom there are references to 'AFS' which i believe implies the filesystem on the paintbox is Andrew File System. AFS seems to be a distributed filesystem from the 1980s which allows multiple users to share files within a group of machines so this allies itself to what quantel was doing with the paintbox in the late 1980s where artists could share work between paintbox stations so it sounds like a good match.The filesystem seems to be buried away under the OS, although you can see 'user' files it seems there is no mechanism to access anything to do with the system files, or if there is i have not discovered it.I have many quantel hard disk images & images of magneto optical disks i can read in a hex editor but that's just a hexdump of the disk.If anyone has any experience with AFS, is there a way to identify if the disk images are indeed formatted as AFS? bearing in mind it will date to the 1980s...

author: alm
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 01, 2017, 01:46:50 pm
content: Not an AFS expert, bus as far as I know AFS is something that uses an existing volume with some other file system (on Unix this might be some form of FFS, on Linux ext2, etc) as storage. Somewhat similar to NFS or SMB. So the disk images would be formatted using one of those filesystems. If you have trouble deciphering the weird file names, then it might have been an AFS server, but until that time, I do not think the AFS reference will be of any use.If it dates back to the 1980s and used AFS, then the most likely system was some sort of UNIX variant. So I would look at the filesystems used by Solaris, HP-UX, BSD, etc during those days. Either Linux, one of the *BSD variants or OpenSolaris/whatever they are called these days might be your best bet for modern operating systems that might support those filesystems. Also keep in mind that the partition table may not be PC-BIOS compatible.

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 01, 2017, 02:01:48 pm
content: Mark, might be worth a try.http://cpm80.com/http://www.cpm.z80.de/I used to use 22nice to read oddball CPM disks, might be barking up a wrong tree but might still be helpful if the Paintbox was using something vaguely like CP/M in the filesystem.

author: abraxa
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 01, 2017, 02:15:35 pm
content: Also worth a shot if you're on linux (or OSX): "file /some/file" may be able to tell you what file system it is or in case a bootsector is included, what kind of boot sector it recognized.

author: Fungus
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 01, 2017, 03:42:05 pm
content: Quote from: dexters_lab on July 01, 2017, 01:32:36 pmI doubt it. AFS is a distributed file system.Post the first few sectors here in hexadecimal. I'm sure somebody will recognize it.

author: stj
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 01, 2017, 03:53:39 pm
content: i would be surprised if Linux does not have a kernel-driver.although that does not imply that it's actually compiled on mainstream distro's like Ubuntu.

author: mycroft
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: July 01, 2017, 04:53:56 pm
content: Take a look at the OpenAFS Projecthttps://www.openafs.org/. The Linux kernel supports this file system. Not sure in what media you have your filesystem.

author: dexters_lab
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: July 01, 2017, 05:38:37 pm
content: yes the mentions of AFS in the data could be a red herring. i have read up about AFS though and a lot of it's features could well be applicable in the way the paintboxes were usedone system i do know Quantel used a lot was VAX, so it could be related to thati have attached the first 10k worth of data from an MO disk and a hard disk as a hex dump, see if anyone recognises the disk format

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 02, 2017, 01:25:09 am
content: AFSis part of the Andrew project which was really interesting.ftp://ftp.andrew.cmu.edu/pub/AUIS/PAPERS/atk/Boren.CACM

author: dexters_lab
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: July 08, 2017, 05:33:26 pm
content: sorry to bump this but thought i'd post up the answerthe filesystem was designed in house at Quantel, apparently by a chap called Alex... so i am guessing it's Alex File System.

author: NivagSwerdna
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 08, 2017, 05:55:25 pm
content: There seem to be a pair of enthusiasts that are playing with restoring Quantelhave a look at...https://youtu.be/-s5yN0_7Dok?list=PL37207D9E3FC84572I didn't respond earlier because I didn't see it as relevant but one of the places I worked has a huge global AFS installation. That AFS is a distributed file system where files are copied across replicated cells on an eventually consistent basis.Looks like AFS in Quantel terms is different. Indeed looking at the boot screen seems to be a generic term pertaining to the custom O/S?(Once caught glimpse of a Quantel in a Newman Street, London basement many moons ago... awesome piece of kit for the time)Back in days of lore there was AFS "Acer Fast Filesystem" which was one of the fs supported on Xenix... that might be a red herring!

author: dexters_lab
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: July 08, 2017, 06:20:02 pm
content: yes that's Stephen (RetrogamerVX), he began restoring a DPB-7001 some time ago but he stopped work on it. The DPB-7001 was the original Paintbox released in 1982. Eight years later in the early 1990s the 'v-series' paintboxes replaced it, a lot of the architecture is the same but the hardware is very different.After Stephen stopped work on it in 2014 he passed everything onto me for safe keeping and potential restoration so i actually now own the system in that video.