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

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

On May 17, 2013, at 11:34 AM, Bob Armstrong wrote:

John Wilson wrote:
this is a ridiculous security risk 
so that's why MOP had a magic number 

Yep, even the DMR has a boot "password", which is just an 8 bit value set
by dip switches on the board, that has to match up with the MOP message.

They DMA a small program into memory

Ah, I was wondering about that, because there aren't any separate boot
ROMs on the DEUNA.   I bet the "small program" is just part of the T11 code.


And I'm assuming that this scheme didn't work on any UNIBUS VAXes - only
PDPs.

That sounds right.   The network interface needs a way to tell the machine to restart.   On a VAX, the Unibus doesn't do that.   In theory you could have a console front end processor that implements MOP Boot message handling and does the restart if it sees one.   (The same would be true on PDP-10 or -20 machines that have a front end processor.)   In practice, I don't remember that such a thing was ever done.

	paul