[Info-vax] Infoserver 150

[John Wallace]

On Oct 20, 10:49 am, Johnny Billquist <b... at softjar.se> wrote:
> On 2012-10-20 02:08, George Cornelius wrote:
>
> > In article <k5sfin$eu... at Iltempo.Update.UU.SE>, Johnny Billquist <b... at softjar.se> writes:
> >> On 2012-10-19 22:42, VAXman- @SendSpamHere.ORG wrote:
> >>> In article <aedrmsF60f... at mid.individual.net>, billg... at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) writes:
> >>>> Once I have it up and running, can a PDP-11 boot off of it, too?
>
> >>> That I do not know.
>
> >> The answer is "no". :-)
> >> Some PDP-11s do know how to netboot, but only using MOP.
> >> As far as I've understood infoservers, they are more than just MOP boot
> >> servers...
>
> > A common use of Infoservers was for booting terminal servers.  Load
> > on a host could get rather high if all terminal servers in a large
> > building or campus rebooted due to a power failure.
>
> Aha. Cool. I didn't know that.
>
> > I don't see why a PDP-11 could not boot from them if it could
> > boot via MOP.
>
> Right. If an Infoserver can serve DECserver, then it can also serve a
> PDP-11.
>
> > Of course, the disk serving protocols inuse (LAD and LAST)
> > would probably be completely foreign to a PDP11 O/S. Still,
> > you could likely load diagnostics or RSX11S boot images.
>
> Thanks. LAD and LAST were the things I was thinking of earlier, without
> remembering the names. Yes, those protocols are not known in the PDP-11
> world today.
> And RSX11S is the only PDP-11 OS I know of which was pretty much
> designed for netbooting, except of course things like terminal servers...
>
>         Johnny

Whether Bill's goals are achievable may depend on what the PDP11
expects after the first part of boot. As you say, RSX11S would network
boot, and in order to that properly e.g. configure DECnet and so on,
wasn't there more to it than just the initial MOP download? Will an
Infoserver 150 do that for an 11S client? (I don't know much about
RSX11S but for a while I looked after a couple of products that used
11S-based systems as data concentrator boxes; the necessary bits were
easy with Phase IV DECnet on VMS as the boot host, but that isn't
quite what we have in this picture).

I know Busybox is small, but I'd have imagined DECservers of the
100/200/etc family were even smaller.