[HECnet] RHESUS is (finally) up again

[Steve Davidson]

MOP running on VMS or NetBSD can serve any of the DECserver platforms.   In some cases you need to associate the MAC address of a DECserver with an image on the load host,   and in other cases the DECserver will request of the load host the image by file name.   I suspect that Linux may be able to do the same as NetBSD.   It is always better to have multiple load hosts available on such a (potentially) large network.

DEC in the Spitbrook Road Facility (ZKO) would run many load hosts per floor.   Most system managers welcomed this so that MOP loading became distributed.   We would use VAXen and InfoServers to support this.   It just plain worked.   I preferred the InfoServers myself because they were so much faster and Field Service would hand you a CD with diagnostics for the various families of VAXen that could all be loaded over the network.   If you have ever tried to load DEC diags via TK50 you would understand the value of this.

-Steve


________________________________

From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE on behalf of Johnny Billquist
Sent: Wed 10/28/2009 10:34
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] RHESUS is (finally) up again



Mark Wickens wrote:
On Wed, 2009-10-28 at 10:15 -0400, Fred wrote:
On Wed, 28 Oct 2009, Johnny Billquist wrote:

I have someone booting some DECserver 200 which was served by PONDUS:: (It's
all in the logs...)
Only a couple of days ago.
For some reason that strikes me as "pretty neat".   It all goes over the
bridge and onto HECNet "somewhere" to find a host willing to do a load. :)

Fred



That's exactly what I was thinking... might save me having to dig out my
decserver software firmware sometime...

PONDUS can serve the firmware for DECserver 100, DECserver 200 and
DECserver 300. That's all the firmware I have, and I also suspect that I
cannot get RSX to feed MOP images for other models, because RSX wants to
be picky about some stuff I think it should properly ignore.

              Johnny