[HECnet] Boot VAX from Alpha host Infoserver?

[gerry77 at mail.com]

On Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:26:04 -0500, you wrote:

I have looked at this first hand.   We are still missing something.   For
some reason the ISL is unable to find what it needs to complete the
process.   The other thing that bothers me is how slow the whole
environment responds to this.
[...]
One of the problems is that the InfoServer system on VMS is *not* the
same as the InfoServer hardware.   The documentation for the hardware
platform was/is much superior to that of the software solution.   I
suspect that we are missing something in the software scenario that
isn't even an issue in the hardware one.

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/83final/ba322_90045/apcs01.html says:
  InfoServer network booting is supported for OpenVMS installations and
upgrades on any OpenVMS Alpha system and on any Integrity servers that
support OpenVMS  , and does NOT mention VAX systems.

I'm just wondering if this is because the VAX architecture is no longer
supported at large or because the host-based Infoserver is not able to
perform ISL for VAXen. Just a speculation: ISL_SVAX sends a strange LAD/LAST
request that the host-based thing is not able to understand, so the ISL sits
there until a timeout is reached and an error is sent to the poor user. :-\

It would be nice to be able to sniff the initial phases of the dialog
between different architecture systems and an InfoServer, just to check if
there are any significant differences in the initial request packets...

A final silly question: do you have actually seen any VAX installing VMS
from a host-based InfoServer? I have missed this simple "detail"! :-)

Thanks,
G.


P.S.: Excuse my English: it's not my native language and sometimes I'm very
dubious about the understandability of my sentences. :-P