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

[Keith Halewood]

We used to do asynchronous ddcmp using a terminal line on a micro VAX 2 having loaded NODRIVER.

Keith

On 10 Dec 2021, at 20:29, Thomas DeBellis <tommytimesharing at gmail.com> wrote:



I know VMS at least did some kind of line.  Columbia's chemistry department got a VAX before the campus Ethernet existed, so that wouldn't have been an option.

However, I can't remember whether it was a synchronous or asynchronous connection; only that the 'wire' went into one of our DN20's (I think CU20B).  I think the 'wire' had modems on both sides, but I can't remember what those were, either.

On 12/10/21 3:24 PM, Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm wrote:

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><mailto: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

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