(last updated: 06-Oct-2014)
Includes keyboard (s/n P7015069) and a 3C19250 USB-to-ethernet adapter (s/n 0100/7B6F133347D), but is missing the stylus
25-Sep-2008
The package arrived today, with everything very well packed, safe and secure. I won this in an eBay auction on September 21, from seller "lpeteril". I'm very satisfied.
The package includes: Audrey, keyboard, AC power adapter, and USB-to-ethernet adapter. Not included (per the auction description) are the stylus, rear-panel wire cover and User's Guide.
The seller's auction description indicates that this unit is upgraded to "run QNX".
25-Sep-2008
The machine and accessories were easily cleaned up with a little wet-wipe and towel-off action, and it looks perfectly mint except for a very minor dent on the metallic top plate.
25-Sep-2008
I had no documentation (later found a PDF copy online!), and since the unit had been 'hacked' I had no idea what I was dealing with. I have no QNX experience, so I started there.
It turns out that QNX is a micro-kernel architected OS targeted at embedded implementations, and that the Audrey was built on QNX in the first place. I guess it all started out when one guy ("sowbug") got hold of a service centers OS image used to reflash Audreys and discovered that it was QNX. He gives the whole history of his adventures at:
http://www.sowbug.com/audrey
Anyway, he was able to implement a hook into the browser CGI that would allow a root shell to be launched. And from there, it's all she wrote since now the machine is clearly open to modification.
As far as I can tell doing a Google search, there are a number of 'hacked' OS images now in existence and it looks like this Audrey has a been upgraded to the 'Infinity 1.1s' image. This image includes an MP3 player, calculator, upgraded Voyager browser, caller ID display, image viewer and other items. The original applications, Address Book, E-Mail, and Datebook are still available. So it looks like I have all of the original functionality and then some.
I first connected Audrey to the phone line instead of ethernet, and entered all the details to connect to sisna.com, using DHCP. Works just great! I can browse and do email with a few caveats. First, the browser is from around 2000, so it has v4 functionality and has some trouble with today's complex and large pages. The email works fine with POP and SMTP (ports 110 and 25), but assumes that the SMTP connection is unauthenticated. I can't get it to send mail via MyRealBox.com which requires authentication for both sending and receiving. Audrey only has credentials for POP, not for SMTP settings. I can send and receive with my local virtual domains, since I have the mail server set up to accept email from anyone on the local network without authentication.
Later, I switched configuration settings to use the USB ethernet device, disabling DHCP (which doesn't work for some reason), and with static IP details. In this case, it's fast, and fully functional.
29-Sep-2008
Tonight, while reading online about hacked Audrey's I discovered the command to mount a SMB share from the command line. This is cool! It turns out that the online example was slightly broken, but now that I have the command I was able to have it show usage with the -h option. In the end, here is how to mount an SMB share:
# fs-cifs -v -a 192.168.1.10:/jared /mnt Audrey audrey
Now I can browse to /mnt from inside the phjuke MP3 player and get to all music files on Astaroth.
Of course, Audrey only knows TCP/IP so she can't connect to Beelzebub, which only accepts incoming connections over IPX, but that could be changed. For now, though, I'm pretty pleased!
15-Oct-2008
(The date of this post is approximate; this system has been powered up and used a mulitude of times between acquisition and the date of the next section.)
It wasn't hard to discover that the root shell was activated using a simple proceedure. Just press the 'Audrey Options' button, then tap the printer icon. That icon is linked to the launching of the shell, as part of the slight amount of hacking done to this machine.
Also, once at the shell, executing phjuke launches the MP3 player. Simple.
09-Sep-2014
Recent searches on the web have turned up information on hacking this system, and now that I have much more experience with UNIX-like systems, when I saw a posting about a very simple way to backup the system image, I just had to try it out. In fact, it is as simple as mounting a windows share, and dumping the images with these commands:
(get to the shell window) # fs-cifs -a //focalor:192.168.1.15:/electronics /mnt dummyuser dummypass # cat /dev/fs0p0 /dev/fs0p1 > /mnt/audrey_#1_dev_fs0p0_dev_fs0p1.dsk # cat /dev/fs0p2 > /mnt/audrey_#1_dev/fs0p2.dsk
The first image contains the two filesystems with the OS, window manager, etc., etc. on it.
The second image contains the initial program load (IPL) boot loader. Normally, this should never be restored in normal imaging operations. First, this data never changes, and, second, if the restoration is interrupted for some reason and the image is corrupted on the system, it will not boot again. At all. So, I have made a copy for the sake of the archive, but never expect to use it.
So, now that this system is imaged, I might begin to experiment with other hacked images that are available on the internet.
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