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

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-05-17 21:00, Cory Smelosky wrote:

On Fri, 17 May 2013, Johnny Billquist wrote:
Unibus VAXen basically means VAX-11 machines. They booted either from
VMB on console media, or (for the 11/750) from a boot block. No network
capabilities there. They could not even boot from tape.

      Johnny



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

That's one way of putting it. Another would be "annoying".

Yeah. VMS distribution did come on tape, but you also got a floppy or TU58 from which you booted the standalone backup on the VAX, and then did the installation using that.

Now, if you instead wanted to install something like Unix from a tape, you had to enter an initial bootstrap by hand into memory. At least the MtXinu distribution actually have the bootstrap codes for all VAX-11 systems listed in the manual.
(Quite helpful when I was installing 4.3 Reno from tape, as it turned out those bootstraps worked for my Reno tape as well, on an VAX 8650.)

	Johnny