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

[cyb 2600]

Yes, there are three mezzanine connectors, they use a proprietary socket as
well. Someone backwards engineered the pinout and was able to wire up a
PCIe Ethernet controller on an x64 Proliant blade. I bought a PCIe Ethernet
card compatible with Itanium OpenVMs and wired up one PCIe channel and the
control signals, but I couldn’t get it to work. The connector is really
tiny and it’s definitely possible I made a soldering mistake. I tried 3 or
4 times before giving up.

On Saturday, December 11, 2021, Supratim Sanyal <supratim at riseup.net> wrote:

> On 12/11/21 10:01 AM, cyb 2600 wrote:
>
> The GBX connectors are 100 pin (I think?) sockets that connect it to the
> bladesystem chassis. The blade actually does have 4 NICs built into it but
> the output is serdes encoded. The serial output channels go out the GBX
> connectors which go to the bladesystem controller, which decodes them and
> sends them to actual Ethernet ports.
>
> There seems to a riser you can get ("mezzanine") that has standard PCIe 1x
> / 4x to which it might be possible to stick in a standard Intel PCIe NIC.
> What OpenVMS would do with it I have no idea.
>
> Anyway, interesting project, following this with attention.
>
> Thanks.
>
>
>
> The iLo Ethernet isn’t serdes,  you can actually wire it straight to an
> RJ45 connector. I don’t think you can use it from within OpenVMS though, at
> least you shouldn’t be able to.
>
> $60 included one dual core CPU and that’s it. I got the 10k SAS hard
> drives, registered RAM, power supply, and some fans for cooling from an old
> HP Proliant server from the same era. Even with the fans I can’t run it
> with the lid on, it overheats in 10 minutes.  I was able to install OpenVMS
> by DDing the iso to a thumb drive and plugging it into one of the USB ports
> on the front.
>
> On Saturday, December 11, 2021, Supratim Sanyal <supratim at riseup.net>
> wrote:
>
>> On 12/11/21 9:19 AM, cyb 2600 wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> What is a "GBX" signal connector at the rear ?
>>
>> https://hugepdf.com/download/hp-integrity-bl860c-specificati
>> ons-5b1fda510762c_pdf
>>
>> https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=emr_na-c02230214
>> (870c - probably close enough)
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> Did the $60 include the processors and memory?
>>
>> Best,
>> /s.
>>
>>
>>
>> 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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