[HECnet] Connecting an HP Itanium BL860c to HECNET... without ethernet

[Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm]

On Friday, December 10, 2021 at 12:19 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
> > On Dec 10, 2021, at 2:32 PM, cyb 2600 <cyb2600 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > A little while ago I purchased an HP BL860c server blade. It has an Itanium 2
> CPU and I was able to install OpenVMS 8.4 on it. However I do NOT have a HP
> Bladesystem chassis to put the blade in, meaning I can only connect to it via
> the SUV console cable which provides usb, serial, and VGA. There's no way to
> get ethernet out of the thing without plugging it into a rather gigantic
> Bladesystem chassis that I don't have. If it was an x64 based blade running
> windows I could just use a USB->Ethernet adapter but of course those things
> don't have OpenVMS drivers.
> >
> > Given ethernet's not an option, would there be any way to tunnel DECNET
> over the serial port? It seems like that was possible on VAXen and maybe
> even Alphas but I've no mention of doing it on an Itanium. Or if anybody else
> has any ideas of how I could network this thing I would appreciate it.
> 
> I don't know that VMS ever did it, but a number of DECnet systems support
> DDCMP over async lines (terminal serial ports).  That's part of the standard.

VAX/VMS certainly did async DDCMP.  I've no idea if that functionality got 
migrated to Alpha and Itanium.  I'd suggest you try following the VMS example.  
If you can get the configuration steps to work (suggesting Itanium support) then
this should work with a serial line going into a simh VAX.

Good Luck,

- Mark