[HECnet] Boot VAX from Alpha host Infoserver?

[Steve Davidson]

Gerry,

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.   Fred and I have been trying to find where
the bottleneck is.   I will be testing this on my network later today to
see what he may be running into.

The cluster/satellite connection is always an option and I have
suggested it to Fred more than a few times (sorry Fred), but it still
doesn't explain the problem.   We though we had an answer late last night
but to no avail.

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.

-Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On
Behalf Of gerry77 at mail.com
Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 04:45
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Boot VAX from Alpha host Infoserver?

On Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:32:28 -0500 (EST), you wrote:

%ISL-F-BADOPEN, unable to locate SYSBOOT
?06 HLT INST
    PC= 000067C4 PSL= 041F0000

So at this point it eliminates LDDRIVER being part of the problem.

I'm starting to think that either the host-based Infoserver does not
support
VAX network installation or the service is somehow not properly
configured.

Please, excuse me if I'll write obvious things, but...

The Infoserver help says that the volume to be served has to be mounted
/SYSTEM and either /NOWRITE or /FOREIGN, have you done that?

You can see the connected clients by useing the Infoserver management
command:

Infoserver> show last

This command does not work on my host-based Infoserver.

On the host-based thing you have to do something like (I suppose):

$ LASTCP == "$SYS$SYSTEM:ESS$LASTCP"
$ LASTCP SHOW CLIENTS

See also:

$ HELP @ESS$LASTCPHELP
$ HELP @ESS$INFOSERVER

Another option would be to turn MISER into a cluster (temporarily) and

satellite boot the VAX, but I'd want to take an /IMAGE backup of MISER

first as I don't want to wreck him ... I'd cry if I lost all of my 
customizations ... :)

For this purpose you may also want to use a SIMH emulated VAX or create
an
image of the installation CD-ROM volume into another hard disk and
install
the latter into the target machine, then boot from it. :-)

HTH,
G.