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

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

On May 17, 2013, at 12:07 PM, Bob Armstrong wrote:

Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:
Boot.1 == ...
Boot.2 == ...

In my DLV11 example, boot.1 == "RESET" and "JMP @#173000" (and by "RESET",
I mean the PDP11 instruction RESET).   After that, the BDV11 (or KDF11B,
KDJ11 or whatever) takes care of boot.2.   I absolutely admit that it
wouldn't always work, but it would work a lot of the time.   And a little bit
of extra code in the DDCMP driver is "free"...

I see your point.   Yes, clearly you could look for the MOP Boot message (boot.1) in a software DDCMP driver, and handle that just as you described.   And whenever that software driver is operational, the result would be exactly what people expect.   The difference with, say, a DMC11 is that the Boot message handling in the DMC still works even if the CPU is halted, while the one in the software DDCMP driver doesn't.   But with those limitations it would indeed be a perfectly reasonable/useful thing to do.

	paul