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

[Cory Smelosky]

On Fri, 17 May 2013, G. wrote:


On Fri, 17 May 2013 06:49:40 -0700, you wrote:

    DECnet (NCP) has a TRIGGER command that sends a special MOP message to a
remote machine, and that's supposed to force the machine to do a hard reset
and the reboot, presumably via DECnet.

It uses MOP, not DECnet. Although MOP is described among other DECnet
standards and managed with NCP, it does not use DECnet protocols to do its
thing. IIRC it does not even use NETDRIVER & Co. but its own NDDRIVER. :)

  The problem is that it doesn't seem like there are many PDP-11 or VAX
communications interfaces that actually implement this.   The DMR and DMC
appear to, but as far as I can find those are the only ones.   In particular
there don't appear to be any QBUS interfaces that can do it.     Have I missed
any?   Has anybody ever done this?   What interface did you use?

Years ago I made some experiments with CONNECT (and TRIGGER) and a DEC 3000
Alpha workstation. It worked (somewhat), but only if the host was waiting at
the >>> prompt. If that was the case, it was possibile to connect to the SRM,
type commands and receive responses. I do not remember if TRIGGER would start
the boot process or if it did not work. I had the overall feeling that the
DEC  3000 firmware code managing those functions was not very well tested and
debugged as it locked the whole machine quite often...


I wonder if I could do this on my AlphaServer ES40...

I should probably read the manual.   There is that out-of-band management interface so I doubt CONNECT and TRIGGER would be implemented.

HTH, :)
G.


--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments