[Info-vax] VMS VAX and SimH VAX

[Paul Sture]

On Sat, 31 Mar 2012 23:33:30 +0200, MG wrote:

> 
> This is very different from what I'm used to with Alpha and I64
> installation procedures, unless something isn't going as it's supposed
> to...

As the others have pointed out VAX/VMS is somewhat different in this area 
from the other two.  CDROMs weren't around when VAX/VMS first came out so 
the installation catered for installation from floppies, tape, and later 
on InfoServers.  The availability of bootable CDs by the time Alpha/VMS 
arrived gave OVMS Engineering the opportunity to use a different approach 
for the installation, but true to the VMS philosophy of not breaking 
things with upgrades, the VAX/VMS procedure remained essentially the same.

You will also find that various features available in V8 aren't there in 
V7.3.  While some of those differences are due to new features since 7.3, 
others date back to the code base split which occurred in the initial 
port to Alpha - quite a lot of new stuff on Alpha got backported to the 
VAX versions, but not everything made it.

> 
> On 31-3-2012 17:11, Paul Sture wrote:
>
>> BTW I've just downloaded the latest SimH 3.9 Release Candidate, so I'll
>> be playing with it for a while.  Feel free to ask away.
> 
> Maybe I should 'upgrade' as well...

It is only a release candidate, but I haven't come across any problems so 
far.  I have successfully run the SYSTEST UETP.COM load test procedure 
with 120 or so users (though I suspect something in the terminal test 
phase screwed with my console terminal settings and locked it out - 
fortunately by that stage I had TCP/IP configured so I could telnet in 
and carry on).

One important thing however: The SimH documentation which arrived on my 
system via the Ubuntu "apt-get install simh" command was seriously out of 
date (2005).  By grabbing the tar.gz file from github I got much more up 
to date readme files, with 0readme_ethernet.txt in particular containing 
the incantations to get tap working for the network.

Having got those instructions, I still couldn't get the networking going, 
so compiling from the RC2 sources was my next step, and that worked 
straight away.  I am not convinced that the Ubuntu version was compiled 
with networking, or perhaps not with the libpcap and bridge-utils stuff
already present as detailed in the readme...

-- 
Paul Sture