[Info-vax] New guide for hobbyists, OpenVMS 8.4 installation with networking on AXPbox (modern fork of es40)

[John E. Malmberg]

On 11/9/2020 8:34 AM, Remy van Elst wrote:
> 
> If you could spare some time, reporting a bug on Github with more
> information (version of visual studio etc, command output) would put
> it on the list for us to work on eventually

I do not recall seeing any response to my replies to you on the 
encompasserve.org notes forum.

I am curious to see if the axpbox will give usable performance on a 
RPI-2B or RPI-3.

SimH/VAX will now support building an infoserver appliance.  There are 
some bugs in the Makefile that are easily worked around.   I have not 
had time to post an article of how to make it work.

LXC-libvirt being broken for privileged images was the only roadblock I 
have to getting the infoserver fully functional on the network the way I 
want it.  I could fall back to qemu libvirt, but that is much more 
overhead than I want to maintain.

The Infoserver appliance is an easy to setup network disk server.  Not 
sure if tape emulation works on the SimH implementation.

It takes up one core of a Rasperry Pi to run SimH/VAX infoserver as 
there is no idle loop detection available.

Most OpenVMS hardware and emulator can network boot from an Inforserver, 
which makes having one of these on the network ideally the first step 
for setting up a new hobbyist network.

And there are no licensing restrictions from using SimH/VAX Infoserver 
in a commercial environment.  All the code is now Freeware.

Not only can the Infoserver serve the OpenVMS boot media as is, it can 
also be used to serve re-mastered images with the hobbyist license keys 
installed.

Link for running emulators in a libvirt-lxc container, which last worked 
with Ubuntu 14.04.

https://sourceforge.net/p/vms-ports/wiki/SimH-VAX%20in%20a%20Container/

And what you need to know after you get the operating system installed 
so that you can more easily maintain a collection of systems.

Introduction to the VMS Environment:
https://sourceforge.net/p/vms-ports/wiki/IntroVMSEnvironment

VMS System management:
https://sourceforge.net/p/vms-ports/wiki/VMSSystemManagement

Regards,
-John