[Info-vax] MicroVAX/VMS newbie, couple of questions

[John Santos]

In article <ee75a3d1-4357-41b4-ba68-951cb5654735
@m20g2000vbp.googlegroups.com>, tone007 at gmail.com says...> 
> Well, it sounds like thet 3400 has LANCE (ESA0) Ethernet on the
> processor board, which seems to be newer than DEQNA, so hopefully that
> doesn't rule it out.
> 
> However, if the tape drive is out of order, I still might not be
> getting anywhere.  Are network installs possible?

Yes and no...  If you have another VMS system on your LAN, you can
boot the 3400 as a cluster satellite, then copy a good VAX VMS
system disk to it's internal disk using BACKUP or shadowing, shut
down the 3400 and reboot from it's local disk.  (You have to be
careful to either change the volume label on the 3400's disk or
break the network connection before rebooting, or it may try to
rejoin the cluster and then die due to duplicate volume labels.
Once the 3400 is running off its own system disk, you can reconfigure
it to no longer be a cluster member.

Or, if you have network access to a system with a CD drive or a
good copy of VMS and a spare local disk that is big enough, you
can build or copy the essentials to the 2nd local disk, boot from
that disk, and install to your 1st disk.  Or upgrade from the copies
of the kit files on the 2nd disk.  AFAIK, there's no network support
in the install/upgrade environment.

Or, if you have an Alpha or Itanium running VMS V8.3 or later, you
can configure the InfoServer software on it (emulating an InfoServer
local area disk and tape server)  I think VAX VMS that old *does*
support installing from an InfoServer.

Or you could install an Alpha emulator on something (Unix, Mac,
Windows) and install Alpha VMS V8.3 on that and set up the
InfoServer emulator on the emulator and proceed as above.

Or you could install a VAX emulator on any of the above and then
use the cluster satellite disk cloning method...

I don't think there's any way to install VMS (at least on a VAX)
from BOOTP or NFS or anything like that.

(There may be a freeware or open source InfoServer emulator for
Windows or Linux or something out in the wilds of the internet
somewhere, but I can't remember anyone ever using it to install
VMS.  I vaguely remember someone using it as a quorum disk in
a cluster.)

Good Luck!

P.S. Actually, any of these methods would probably be faster than
installing from a real, working TK50!

-- 
John Santos
Evans Griffiths & Hart, Inc.