[HECnet] SIMH VAX Project

[Mark Benson]

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?

-- 
Mark Benson

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"Never send a human to do a machine's job..."