[Info-vax] Infoserver 150

[John Wallace]

On Oct 20, 1:47 pm, Johnny Billquist <b... at softjar.se> wrote:
> On 2012-10-20 12:37, John Wallace wrote:
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> > On Oct 20, 10:49 am, Johnny Billquist <b... at softjar.se> wrote:
> >> On 2012-10-20 02:08, George Cornelius wrote:
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> >>> 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?
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> >>>>> That I do not know.
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> >>>> 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...
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> >>> 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.
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> >> Aha. Cool. I didn't know that.
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> >>> I don't see why a PDP-11 could not boot from them if it could
> >>> boot via MOP.
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> >> Right. If an Infoserver can serve DECserver, then it can also serve a
> >> PDP-11.
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> >>> 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.
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> >> 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...
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> >>          Johnny
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> > 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).
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> No, there is nothing more done after the image have been downloaded, as
> far as networking is concerned. RSX-11S is diskless. All the programs
> you might want to run are already in the image you download, as well as
> all configuration you might do, and what not. -11S is pretty much just a
> case of a single large binary activated, and it is self contained.
> You can have DECnet installed on it, but that is also then already
> loaded and activated in the saved image.
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> > I know Busybox is small, but I'd have imagined DECservers of the
> > 100/200/etc family were even smaller.
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> Busybox is not an operating system. It is basically a shell, with all
> kind of commands compiled into the same image. It needs a Unix system to
> run on.
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> I would definitely suspect that you'll not fit all parts needed into the
> restricted memory of a DECserver, but I don't know for sure.
>
>         Johnny

Busybox is indeed a condensed shell and not an entire OS. It doesn't
exactly need a UNIX system, it does need a LINUX-alike. I'd guess most
readers here will have at least one Busybox in their possession,
whether they know it or not. It's in a Linux-based router, a Linux-
based smart TV, etc. iStuff? Android (it's certainly available for
Android, not sure it's always in there as a necessity)? In general
it's probably invisible, but life is easier (for developers and
others) with it than without it.

As we don't know which DECserver Bill has, we can only guess whether
it'll fit a Linux (with Busybox) or not. My guess is it won't, or if
it will, the effort needed to make a Linux fit and then work in the
undocumented environs of a DECserver may be unrealistic. But people's
idea of a 'fun' project doesn't always match mine. There's no widely
available System Programmer's Guide or equivalent for any DECserver,
is there???

Are you 100% sure the DECnet characteristics of an 11S node are built
in at image build time? I thought stuff like that was downloaded by a
follow-on to the original image load, using stuff set up in the NCP
database. But it's been a while, and I *may* be confusing it with
something similar from the LAVC (or maybe VAXELN) world.