[HECnet] SIMH VAX Project

[Mark Benson]

On 1 Jul 2011, at 17:37, Johnny Billquist wrote:

On 07/01/11 09:33, Mark Benson wrote:

On 1 Jul 2011, at 07:46, Johnny Billquist wrote:

RA92 is 1.4G.

I think 1.6GB is the unformatted size, 1.4GB after initialize.

Well, the unformatted size is actually even bigger, at around 1.9G. But who cares about that? It is not something you can ever see or use.

Is it important for the size of the RAW virtual disk though? I haven't established of the virtual disks in SIMH need to be large enough to contain the unformatted size of the disk they are emulating?

Since SIMH creates standard disk files itself I guess it's not a big issue. I am just curious though.

And it's 1.4G after formatting, not initializing. (Atleast in DEC speak, where formatting is the low level formatting of the device, and initializing is creating a file system.)

Oh, okay. Fair point, I gotten used to stuff coming low-level formatted over the years. It's kind of a non-issue on modern systems! ;)

[...]
So, you have a total blocks of 311200, which matches an RD54, yes. If your disk container is much bigger, and you haven't somehow gotten simh to restrict it, the total blocks number should match the hardware, so this would suggest that you got something wrong outside of VMS.

Yes, I agree the screw-up is in the SIMH config. What I'm not sure about is why SIMH, which had the disks configured as RAUSER (i.e. a user-defined size) value of 9600000 blocks (4.8GB at 512bytes per block) then reverted to using RD54 174MB disk sizes... odd. Perhaps I got the SET command wrong in the vax.ini I wrote, or SIMH interpreted the command wrong. I don't know.

It doesn't matter for now, I'm working with 3 RA92 images that do display the right capacity and I am up and rolling. I can telnet to a separate IP at any time and log right into VMS.

I don't know if this is a purely semantic point (i.e. because the security risk is in real terms negligible given it's a hobbyist machine) but should I be concerned about only having TELNET and no SSH? I used the Compaq TCP/IP 5.1 off the 7.3 CD-ROM. Someone mentioned a later version maybe? Does that have SSH?

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Mark Benson

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