[HECnet] SIMH VAX Project

[Mark Benson]

Running as root cleared up the ethernet issue. It now attaches just fine. Was error 'File open issue' so it couldn't access it as a non-privileged user.

attach xq ra0

The device is re0 not ra0, for the record.
On 30 Jun 2011, at 23:01, Steve Davidson wrote:

This is how SGC:: works today.   It is running NetBSD, SimH, and VAX/VMS 7.3.   Save yourself tons of grief and use two NICs.   One NIC is for NetBSD (IP) the other is for VMS (DECnet and/or IP).   Bring the second NIC up under NetBSD but do NOT assign an IP address to it.   If you wish you can run the bridge on this same machine or run Multinet with its tunnels.

Issue is the machine is physically tiny (mounts on the VESA points on the back of my LCD panel) and, although it has a PCI slot I could throw a 3C905 in, it has no back panel access. The power connector for the PicoPSU is actually right where a possible ethernet connector might be.

USB LAN is a possible option but I don't want to choke the USB bus as I use a SD crd carry the disk images and I don't want to upset the I/O to/from the images. You know how finicky USB can be :P

I can give you access to the SGC:: host machine so that you take a look if you wish.   Just let me know.

I have most of the issues with SIMH sorted out apart from one.

I ran up a couple of 4.8GB images using:

dd if=/dev/zero of=vaxvmsssys.iso bs=512 count=9600000

in Net BSD.

I then set the SIMH emulator up with:

set -L rq0 rauser=9600000

attach rq0 /sdcard/d0.dsk

Using info from here: http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/922

Which was a little vague, to say the least.

It all seemed to work fine. The disk works okay. However, it ran out of space by the time I'd installed VMS 7.3 (including DECwindows/MOTIF support, which I wanted for possible future remote graphical access) and tried to install TCP/IP UCX onto the system. I don't know how to check free space on a device, so I can't see the total blocks available compared to the original dd'd file. I wouldn't have thought VMS would fill a 4.8 GB disk though? It's supposed to install comfortable on an   RA92 and that was only 1.2 or 1.6 GB IIRC.

I probably screwed something up somewhere, but without knowing what, I can't either get access to the full disk or re-install to a full size disk.


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Mark Benson

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