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

[cyb 2600]

Yes, it’s the console line. The blade has an “SUV” connector on the front
that splits into a serial port, vga and two USB ports. I’ll run a “show
dev” and see what kind of device openVMS thinks it is. I can use the vga
and usb keyboard/mouse as the console instead once it boots past all the
EFI stuff.

These blades were never designed to be ran outside of a chassis so I’m
trying to make it do something it was never designed to do.  But it was
only $60 on eBay so I thought it would be a fun project.

On Saturday, December 11, 2021, Wilm Boerhout <wboerhout at gmail.com> wrote:

> It is the console serial line on the Itanium if I followed this correctly
> . Some regular console output may not be redirected and disturb the DDCMP
> protocol.
>
> Groet,
> Wilm
>
> (Verstuurd vanaf mijn telefoon, dus wat korter dan gewoonlijk.)
> (Sent from my phone, so a bit more compact than usual)
>
> > Op 11 dec. 2021 om 12:55 heeft Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> het
> volgende geschreven:
> >
> > On 2021-12-10 20:32, cyb 2600 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.
> >
> > Others have already said a lot. But to just add a little more.
> > As mentioned, at least on VAXen, you can run DECnet over a serial line.
> It might very well be possible also on Alpha and Itanium. Check the docs.
> Even if it isn't officially supported, just try turning it on. In VMS, the
> async DDCMP connections are done over the normal terminal driver, so I
> would suspect there is a fair chance it works, unless they actually ripped
> that code out.
> >
> > However, if we talk HECnet, this isn't enough. You then need to get that
> serial looped back into something that can connect to some remote side.
> > My original HECnet links were actually done this way. I had physical
> serial ports on machines, then then I had another machine at each end to
> which the serial ports connected, and between these two other machines, I
> ran a simple program that just forwarded the bytes on the serial ports on
> both sides.
> >
> > It worked, but of course this is slow, as it was just 9600 bps. So
> eventually I wrote my bridge program to just forward ethernet packets
> instead.
> >
> > But in your case, you'd need something like this again. I think you
> might be able to just hook it up to PyDECnet. It has DDCMP, and I would
> hope it could be convinced to talk over an actual serial port. If it can't,
> I'm sure Paul could fix that.
> >
> >  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
>
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