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

[Cory Smelosky]

On Fri, 17 May 2013, Johnny Billquist wrote:


On 2013-05-17 21:22, Cory Smelosky wrote:

On Fri, 17 May 2013, Johnny Billquist wrote:


On 2013-05-17 21:13, Cory Smelosky wrote:

On Fri, 17 May 2013, Bob Armstrong wrote:

Really?   Not from tape?   Interesting design choice...

Old VAXes booted standalone BACKUP from the console media (TU58 or
RX01).
SA BACKUP then could talk to tape drives just fine.   It's all you
need to
install VMS, so that was all they did.


Ah right.   Makes more sense how.

How were the VAX BSDs installed then?   Standalone bootloader on a
floppy?

The one time I did it, I actually hacked the boot loader into memory
from the console, and started from there. The boot loader was listed in
the manual.
But (as I mentioned in another mail), this came from MtXinu. Not sure
how other BSDs did it, as I never had an original distribution from any
other.

But once you had the system installed, you also created a console media
which could boot the thing, as VMB was not able to boot a Unix system
anyway, even from disk.


Ahhh.   That'd be why when I've installed 4.3BSD on the -11/780 simulator
I needed an external executable to boot it.

That sounds likely.
Modern versions on VMB can boot Unix (like the version distributed with
simh), but it still also requires that the system understand the
information it gets passed by VMB. Doubt 4.3 understands that.
NetBSD works fine with VMB. Even on the 11/780, now that we've
identified that NetBSD wrote broken boot blocks for a long time, and
that has been fixed.


Yeah, I'd be surprised to see 4.3BSD understanding that.   I wonder what my copy of The Design and Implementation says about the boot process...

I like how recent NetBSD still supports the 11/780!

	Johnny



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Cory Smelosky
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