[HECnet] SIMH VAX Project

[Mark Wickens]

On 30/06/11 08:25, Kari Uusim  ki wrote:
On 30.6.2011 10:10, Mark Benson wrote:
Hi guys.

(apologies if this arrives twice - it's way too early in the morning and I got woken up even ealier!)

Still never got to fixing the DECW setup on the Alpha. Will sort that some time, maybe. Got to work out how to get files off the machine. :)

I have a second OpenVMS project now. I have an Atom D410PT system (Mini-ITX board) with a 16GB SSD and a SD card reader that runs NetBSD 5.1 and SIMH. I have successfully bootstrapped SIMH and OpenVMS 7.3-1 (I think it's -1 not sure, definitely 7.3) onto a virtual disk. So now I have a silent, power efficient machine with which to get up to speed on OpenVMS basics. I can also backup the disk images periodically so if I make a blunder it's a no-brainer to get the working system back.

First barrier I hit is TCP/IP. I don't think the 7.3 Install script ever asked me to install it. It asked for DECNet-Plus (which I declined) and DECNet-PhaseIV (which I gladly accepted) but no TCP/IP support. Did I do something wrong or is it a separate install on VAX? It was included with 8.3 Alpha.

When I try to:

SET DEF SYS$MANAGER
@TCP$CONFIG.COM

It barfs and says the file is not found. I have licences registered for UCX and UCX-IP-CLIENT. If TCP/IP was installed it would surely have just failed on a license issue if the license wasn't in place, though?

-- 

On a semi-related note I noticed something installing 7.3 that it said not to install DECNet-Plus if you want to use DECNet-PhaseIV. Since HECNet is PhaseIV I didn't install Plus on the VAX EMulator, but I *did* IIRC on the Alpha. Will the Alpha need a re-install or reconfiguration of some kind to run on HECNet?


Hi,

The last VAX-VMS version is V7.3. There has never been a V7.3-1 for VAX, but only for Alpha.

You need to install TCP/IP separately. It can be done from the V7.3 VAX-VMS media. That version isn't the latest so if you want to install the latest, you have to use a later SPL media.

Both DECnet-plus and DECnet Phase IV work similarly, but the configuration and management is quite different. DECnet-plus offers OSI and TCP/IP integration with DECnet (e.g. DECnet-over-TCP/IP).
You don't need to change your Alpha installation if you just want to run DECnet. If you did configure DECnet-plus for just DECnet use, you'll be fine with it.

I don't know if the DECnet-over-TCP/IP functionality will work with HECnet, because I haven't had time to test it, but pure DECnet should work fine.


Kari



See these instructions for details on what you need to do: http://www.wherry.com/gadgets/retrocomputing/vax-simh.html

Regards, Mark.