Ansible Playbook: Windows NT 4 on Uberspace

Heavily inspired by https://github.com/aaronk6/win311-uberspace-ansible.

This playbook will set up an Uberspace to host a Windows NT 4 VM running a web server on port 80 and make it available behind a per-user nginx service. QEMU will be used for virtualisation.

You will need to provide your own HDD image for the VM. It’s not included here, but the playbook will upload it for you if you specify the path.

Why?

Why not?

Why Windows NT 4?

It’s the first version of Windows that included a fully-featured IIS with HTTP, FTP and Gopher support as well as integration with FrontPage for authoring.

Run Playbook

ansible-playbook site.yml

This will prompt for the path to c.img (the HDD image for the VM). Alternatively, you can specify the path on the command line to avoid the prompt:

ansible-playbook site.yml -e 'local_drive_c_img="/Users/rubenarakelyan/Documents/Images/c.img"'

Note: The single quotes are only required if your path contains spaces.

VNC to Windows VM

Establish an SSH tunnel to Uberspace (assuming your Uberspace is winnt4.example.com):

ssh -L 5901:localhost:5901 winnt4.example.com

Then use a local VNC client to connect to localhost:5901. On macOS, this works with RealVNC (VNC Viewer.app), but not with the integrated screen sharing app.

Telnet to QEMU Monitor

Use this for committing changes to c.img. By default, changes are discarded on exit (snapshot mode).

ssh -L 4444:localhost:4444 winnt4.example.com

Then locally:

telnet localhost 4444
commit ide0-hd0

Download image: