[HECnet] Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

[Cory Smelosky]

On 17 May 2013, at 15:45, "Clem Cole" <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 3:13 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
How were the VAX BSDs installed then?   Standalone bootloader on a floppy?

Often - that was the way.    There were TU58 tapes and floppies from Evans Hall that can with your 4.1BSD tapes that did the cold boot.   That code contained enough of a system to talk to the tape drive.

The Design and Implementation book would agree. ;)

Apparently utilities were included to write the image to the frontend filesystem.


Before Kriddle and Asa would form MtXinu, a bunch of us in Cory Hall hacked to a raw boot system, and I do not remember why.   IIRC it was Asa Romberger that did that hack, and he might have done it originally for IngVax.      I do remember Bob would come to test it on one of my 780's (Sprite - aka UCBCAD) because we have newer/fancier/self threading 9-tracks with  vacuum  columns (model number escapes me) than we had in Evan.

We had 3 780s (Coke, Sprite and Tab)   in the CAD group, but big (Sprite) was one donated by DEC and was one of the only ones on campus that did not have a lot of "foreign" hardware in it - so Sam Leffler, Bob and I would use it to do tests when we wanted to make sure the "Pure Maynard" stuff still worked.