[HECnet] VAX diagnostics?

[William Pechter]

Diags didn't ship with VMS.  They were DEC proprietary and wiped when a customer was off DEC maintenance. 

The tape was called Vaxpax and at the 8650 VMS 4.2 time frame they needed compatibility mode to run.  I left DEC in '86 and the third party TRW diags were not as impressive.  Alliant and Masscomp built similar diag supervisors which were better than stuff I saw on machines like Concurrent/Perkin-Elmer boxes... XXDP/DEC 11 was better than their diags. 

Bill
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On Sep 9, 2018, 12:01, at 12:01, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
>Hi.
>
>On 2018-09-09 17:54, Keith Halewood wrote:
>> What about [sys0.syscommon.sysmaint] ?
>> I’m not close to my simh vaxen at the moment.
>
>Nothing there. I also checked the distribution CD, and there is nothing
>
>there either, unless it's in some saveset.
>
>   Johnny
>
>> 
>> Keith
>> 
>>> On 9 Sep 2018, at 08:50, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
>>>
>>> I've been playing around a little with out 8650 lately, and finally
>got irritated enough at the limitation of some diagnostics that I
>decided to read up a bit.
>>>
>>> The problem is that we have a lot of diagnostics for the 8650,
>however, they are from around 1990, when the console pack was created.
>Some devices, such as RA73 (of which we have a bunch connected) are
>newer than that, so our diagnostics do not know about them, and
>therefore ignore them.
>>>
>>> Reading up on this turned out that the autosized tool, called EVSBA,
>is generic and used on all models. And we have version 7.2 on our pack,
>and we need to have version 7.5 in order to have it handle RA73 disks.
>>>
>>> Reading more, it sounded like these programs would normally live in
>VMS as well, under [SYS0.SYSMAINT]. However, the VMS I have, which was
>installed from the 7.3 CD distribution, have nothing in
>[SYS0.SYSMAINT], so now my obvious question is, do anyone have "modern"
>versions of the diagnostics programs?
>>>
>>> EVSBA would be one obvious one I'm looking for, but EVRL* which are
>all the tools for RA disks are also interesting. I'm not sure if our
>current versions would handle an RA73 either.
>>>
>>> If people have other bits, that would also be nice. If they are on
>HECnet, even better, since if I boot VMS, our 8650 is also on HECnet,
>so that would make copying really easy. But if you have them somewhere
>else, that's also usable.
>>>
>>>   Johnny
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
>>>                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
>>> email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
>>> pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
>
>-- 
>Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
>                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
>email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
>pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
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