My 11/730 is not happy the electronics work great and are even fairly easy to fix, but keeping disk drives on the thing working is proving to be a challenge. Right now it has two RA81s and one has quit completely ( servo fine position error ) and the other is flaky. The original R80 on the RB730 had the HDA die years ago and I ve never been able to find a replacement.
I have several vintage SMD drives, including a couple of nice CDC 9715 drives, that I was thinking about using to replace the RA8x drives. I have not one but two UNIBUS SMD controllers an Emulex SC21 and a Spectra Logic 121 that I thought would do the job, but after reading the fine print yesterday that turns out not to be true. Both controllers emulate RH11s with RM0x drives attached, which is fine if you re a PDP-11 but VMS has never supported that configuration.
[Before anybody says Wait RM05s are supported by VMS, that s only partly true. VMS supported MASSBUS disks on a RH750 or RH780 controller, but VMS has never supported the RH11. Emulex actually sold a special VMS driver for their card, but I don t have it and besides, VMB still wouldn t support it. The Spectra Logic manual only talks about PDP-11 OSes and carefully avoids ever mentioning VMS.]
I ve got some RA7x drives, but there s no easy way to mount them or supply power to them. I m not sure if there ever was a rack mount chassis for RA7x drives. There was for RA9x drives, but those I don t have. I also have two RC25 drives and several AZTEC controllers, but those drives were horribly unreliable even when they were new. Neither works, and fixing them or getting removable media for them is hopeless.
Does anybody have any other ideas? Who else has an old UNIBUS VAX? What are you doing to disk drives?
I ve actually had the 11/730 for about fifteen years now I restored it out of parts from two different 730s that were scrapped. It s been fairly easy to keep running except for the drives, and although it s admittedly a bit slow, it s a cool machine.
Bob
Well I suppose I could try to find one - could roll out a Netware VM + NEXTSTEP does Netware file sharing..
sampsa <sampsa at mac.com>
mobile +358 40 7208932
On 14 Jul 2013, at 14:15, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
Morning all,
Would anyone be interested in adding IPX to the tunnels? ;)
I have an IPX network partially up at the moment. Is there any OpenVMS IPX support? There's SNA integration so I don't see why DEC wouldn't let Novell be unsupported. ;)
Sampsa, you could join easily if you pick up a low-power older cisco router for absurdly cheap if you don't care about speed. (like a 2524...10BASE-T! It'd be perfect for IPX and low-bandwidth DECnet tunnels!)
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
Morning all,
Would anyone be interested in adding IPX to the tunnels? ;)
I have an IPX network partially up at the moment. Is there any OpenVMS IPX support? There's SNA integration so I don't see why DEC wouldn't let Novell be unsupported. ;)
Sampsa, you could join easily if you pick up a low-power older cisco router for absurdly cheap if you don't care about speed. (like a 2524...10BASE-T! It'd be perfect for IPX and low-bandwidth DECnet tunnels!)
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
There are some of you who may have noticed the tunnel system trying to update my tunnel with a source IP of nothing.
I've fixed the script which populates the db with my home IP address so that will not happen again.
I also added data sanity checking code to the tunnel config system to better deal with this sort of thing in the future. A blank IP would actually cause the pySNMP module to explode into flames and bring the entire thing down. :)
-brian
On 2013-07-12 21:35, Bob Armstrong wrote:
VCP will do the trick for you, but for that you need the latest version of
RSX.
If you have that, the command is just VCP COPY
Finally luck is on my side - I have VCP. Never used it before, but after
perusing the help it looks like I need to do something like
VCP CONNECT xyx/CR:RL02
VCP COPY/DEVICE DL0: VF0:
<swap packs now>
VCP COPY/DEVICE VF0: DL0:
VCP DISCONNECT VF0
My fingers crossed.....
Should work. You might possibly want to mount the devices foreign, but otherwise you should be good.
I've never had to use the /DEVICE switch. It works correctly by default.
You might like using the /STATUS switch, to see the progress.
I think I'll go crank up the 730 to copy the RL02...
:-)
Sadly the 730 doesn't boot. I was afraid it wouldn't - the RA81 is being
cranky. "Servo fine positioning error" (which probably means "the HDA is
trash"!) Those things are not particularly reliable, but there aren't many
alternatives for disk drives.
Check that the transport lock isn't engaged.
Johnny
VCP will do the trick for you, but for that you need the latest version of
RSX.
If you have that, the command is just VCP COPY
Finally luck is on my side - I have VCP. Never used it before, but after
perusing the help it looks like I need to do something like
VCP CONNECT xyx/CR:RL02
VCP COPY/DEVICE DL0: VF0:
<swap packs now>
VCP COPY/DEVICE VF0: DL0:
VCP DISCONNECT VF0
My fingers crossed.....
I think I'll go crank up the 730 to copy the RL02...
:-)
Sadly the 730 doesn't boot. I was afraid it wouldn't - the RA81 is being
cranky. "Servo fine positioning error" (which probably means "the HDA is
trash"!) Those things are not particularly reliable, but there aren't many
alternatives for disk drives.
Bob
Will do.
-brian
On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 06:26:36AM -0000, Cory Smelosky wrote:
Can't remember your email off-hand, Brian.
I need some modifications made, please.
Change the source int for the tunnels to Dialer0 and set the hostname you
use to dev.gimme-sympathy.org. I intend to switch to a static plan soon.
( My edge is currently a 3745 and I haven't quite figured out NAT and port
access so it may not be allowing SNMP in. ;) )
Thanks!
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
On 2013-07-12 16:46, Bob Armstrong wrote:
Sounds like I'd better use an error free pack for the output, then.
Fortunately error free RL02s aren't that unusual, even today.
If you can get that, then you're good.
Johnny Billquist (bqt at softjar.se) wrote:
Eh... BAD is a BAD idea in this case.
I disagree - how else will you know if it's error free?
Well, BAD will do the checking, and with the right switches will tell you what bad blocks it finds, so from that point of view, sure. But do not expect the copy operation to care about what BAD found out. But if you just want a verification that the pack is error free, then sure, it will do that trick for you.
But check the /IMAGE switch to BRU...
Umm...
> HELP BRU /IMAGE
BRU>/IMAGE:SAVE source target
:RESTORE
/IMAGE specifies that you want to do a multivolume disk-to-disk
backup or restore operation.
.....
Doesn't sound like what I want. [It's odd - VMS BACKUP has a /IMAGE
option, but it does something entirely different.]
Ok. Checked BRU and /IMAGE is not useful here.
VCP will do the trick for you, but for that you need the latest version of RSX. If you have that, the command is just VCP COPY
All that said, it's about 10 lines of MACRO-11, if you want to keep it very simple.
I think I'll go crank up the 730 to copy the RL02...
:-)
Johnny
Sounds like I'd better use an error free pack for the output, then.
Fortunately error free RL02s aren't that unusual, even today.
Johnny Billquist (bqt at softjar.se) wrote:
Eh... BAD is a BAD idea in this case.
I disagree - how else will you know if it's error free?
But check the /IMAGE switch to BRU...
Umm...
> HELP BRU /IMAGE
BRU>/IMAGE:SAVE source target
:RESTORE
/IMAGE specifies that you want to do a multivolume disk-to-disk
backup or restore operation.
.....
Doesn't sound like what I want. [It's odd - VMS BACKUP has a /IMAGE
option, but it does something entirely different.]
I think I'll go crank up the 730 to copy the RL02...
Thanks,
Bob
Below
On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 6:51 PM, Bob Armstrong <bob at jfcl.com> wrote:
FWIW, the pack is from an ancient Unix and is not in Files11, RT11, or any other format that RSX knows about.
Given it's from an ancient UNIX system, why not let UNIX do the work? What model PDP-11 is it and I assume is has an ethernet if it's on the DECnet?
I'd just fire up a minimal *BSD for the PDP11 [which has ethernet drivers] and then do something in the scheme of:
dd if=/dev/[raw RL device] ibs=20480 obs=1b | [rs]sh some_remote_host dd ibs=1b obs=20480 of=diskimage
Once you have it in a file, you can mount diskimage in simh on get the data you want using whatever OS or system you like.
Note you might want set the ibs=1b and add conv=sync,noerror to minimize effects of bad blocks, since you are more interested in saving data then speed. You'll want to log/save away the console log so you know where the bad blocks are, since they will show up in the results as blocks of zeros.
Clem
We used the trick a couple of years ago, al biet was saving a bootable (DOS11) tape of an ancient UNIX file system. Worked like a charm. Warren Toomey now has the resulting bits on his PDP heritage site.
On 2013-07-12 13:36, John Wilson wrote:
From: Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se>
But if RT-11 uses this device driver even when reading the disk without
trying to handle it as an RT-11 file system, then the RT-11 device
driver can't be used at all if you want to read foreign packs.
There's a .SPFUN to bypass RT's private bad-block replacement (yes the list
is in block 1), so you can easily write a small program to do the copy, but
I'm 99% sure COPY/DEVICE will just use .READ so, bad news.
Writing a stand-alone program to copy RLs would be straightforward, if you
wanted to be done once and for all.
Yes, you could easily do a trivial copy program standalone.
However, we still have the problem with any actual bad block mismatches between the two packs.
There is no real good solution here. Find error free packs is all I can say.
As for the original question, under RSX, there are several ways, as have already been mentioned.
Johnny
On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 2:26 AM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
Can't remember your email off-hand, Brian.
I need some modifications made, please.
Change the source int for the tunnels to Dialer0 and set the hostname you
use to dev.gimme-sympathy.org. I intend to switch to a static plan soon.
( My edge is currently a 3745 and I haven't quite figured out NAT and port
access so it may not be allowing SNMP in. ;) )
Thanks!
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
Hello!
How the <BLEEP!> did you manage to get a big IBM thing into your place
that only plays with IBM mainframes? (And then decidedly persnickety
as well.)
----
Incidentally the Yeti that were abusing the systems at Dave's are at
your place. More arrived where he is, including the twenty four on a
road trip.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
From: Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se>
But if RT-11 uses this device driver even when reading the disk without
trying to handle it as an RT-11 file system, then the RT-11 device
driver can't be used at all if you want to read foreign packs.
There's a .SPFUN to bypass RT's private bad-block replacement (yes the list
is in block 1), so you can easily write a small program to do the copy, but
I'm 99% sure COPY/DEVICE will just use .READ so, bad news.
Writing a stand-alone program to copy RLs would be straightforward, if you
wanted to be done once and for all.
John Wilson
D Bit
On 2013-07-12 11:38, Cory Smelosky wrote:
On Fri, 12 Jul 2013, Johnny Billquist wrote:
BAD in turn only updates the bad block list on the pack, and do nothing
else. This is why these packs reserve the last track. That is where the
bad block list is expected to reside, along with pack serial number.
What if the last track ends up composed entirely of bad blocks? ;)
Then that pack is screwed. The bad block list is a little complex, but you need a couple of ok blocks on the last track, or it really is a broken pack.
To be more specific about the last track, the blocks are divided into manufacturer bad block lists, and user bad block lists. I seem to remember that it alternates between the two, so block 0,2,4,... are manufacturer bad block list copies, and 1,3,5,... are replicas of the user bad block list.
And the manufacturer bad block list also have some pack metadata stored, such as the pack serial number.
If the first block with the list can't be read, you are expected to try one of the alternates.
However, all that said (I'm using that phrase much right now), lots of software abuse and fail on this. Many do not at all even look at the user bad block list, and some even just ignore the manufacturer bad block list. There is no physical protection from anyone just overwriting all those blocks anyway, and I think Unix make use of all the tracks, for example.
John mentioned that the device driver in RT-11 handles the bad block remapping in the driver itself. OS/8 do that too. However, they create their own bad block list adapted for the device driver, placed somewhere else (like in block 1 for RT-11 if I understood John right). That list should hopefully be based on what is stored in the last track, but this is also something done at filesystem initialization.
But if RT-11 uses this device driver even when reading the disk without trying to handle it as an RT-11 file system, then the RT-11 device driver can't be used at all if you want to read foreign packs.
Like I said, the RSX driver do not do anything at all. If just gives you all blocks. Good or bad.
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
On Fri, 12 Jul 2013, Johnny Billquist wrote:
BAD in turn only updates the bad block list on the pack, and do nothing
else. This is why these packs reserve the last track. That is where the
bad block list is expected to reside, along with pack serial number.
What if the last track ends up composed entirely of bad blocks? ;)
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
On 2013-07-12 00:51, Bob Armstrong wrote:
I have an RL02 pack and a RSX system and I want to 1) copy a sector
by sector image of the RL02 to a 20480 block file and then b) mount a
new pack, BAD it, and then copy the same image back to the new pack. On
VMS I d just use COPY /DEVICE or maybe BACKUP /PHYSICAL, but I m having
a tough time figuring out the RSX equivalent.
I thought PIP would do it, ( PIP FOO.IMG=DL0: ) but that fails if the
disk isn t mounted or if it s mounted as /FOREIGN. I don t think BRU
or DSC understand non-ODS volumes, and I don t know any other utilities
that copy files.
FWIW, the pack is from an ancient Unix and is not in Files11, RT11,
or any other format that RSX knows about.
Otherwise my only choice will be to fire up the 730 so I can get an
RL02 attached to a real operating system J
Eh... BAD is a BAD idea in this case. The problem with RL packs is that bad blocks are not hidden, but very visible. And the list of bad blocks are actually written on a disk block. The device driver does not do anything will the bad block information. Instead it is the file system initialization code which reads in the bad block list from the pack, and they allocate all the bad blocks on the pack to the [0,0]BADBLK.SYS file, so that they are not used by any other file.
BAD in turn only updates the bad block list on the pack, and do nothing else. This is why these packs reserve the last track. That is where the bad block list is expected to reside, along with pack serial number.
So if copy pack A to pack B, and you have bad blocks on pack A, they will also be marked as bad blocks on pack B, while if you have bad blocks on pack B, they will be forgotten.
All that said, if you are running the latest version of RSX, the easiest way of copying is to use VCP.
All that said, I think that BRU can also do the work, although I have not played with that.
But check the /IMAGE switch to BRU...
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
Can't remember your email off-hand, Brian.
I need some modifications made, please.
Change the source int for the tunnels to Dialer0 and set the hostname you use to dev.gimme-sympathy.org. I intend to switch to a static plan soon.
( My edge is currently a 3745 and I haven't quite figured out NAT and port access so it may not be allowing SNMP in. ;) )
Thanks!
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
From: "Bob Armstrong" <bob at jfcl.com>
I thought the DL driver did the bad block revectoring.
Only on RT. So reading an alien DL: or DM: pack (with random stuff at the
end of block 1) on RT is a great way to scramble it.
John Wilson
D Bit
Perhaps simplest would be to boot a RSTS system on that machine, and write the 4 line Basic-PLUS program that will do the moral equivalent of "dd" to do the image copy.
(That won't cope with bad blocks, though. In fact, if you have bad blocks in different spots on source vs. destination, you need a file structured copy.)
paul
On Jul 11, 2013, at 6:51 PM, Bob Armstrong wrote:
I have an RL02 pack and a RSX system and I want to 1) copy a sector by sector image of the RL02 to a 20480 block file and then b) mount a new pack, BAD it, and then copy the same image back to the new pack. On VMS I d just use COPY /DEVICE or maybe BACKUP /PHYSICAL, but I m having a tough time figuring out the RSX equivalent.
I thought PIP would do it, ( PIP FOO.IMG=DL0: ) but that fails if the disk isn t mounted or if it s mounted as /FOREIGN. I don t think BRU or DSC understand non-ODS volumes, and I don t know any other utilities that copy files.
FWIW, the pack is from an ancient Unix and is not in Files11, RT11, or any other format that RSX knows about.
Otherwise my only choice will be to fire up the 730 so I can get an RL02 attached to a real operating system :)
Thanks,
Bob
I have an RL02 pack and a RSX system and I want to 1) copy a sector by sector image of the RL02 to a 20480 block file and then b) mount a new pack, BAD it, and then copy the same image back to the new pack. On VMS I d just use COPY /DEVICE or maybe BACKUP /PHYSICAL, but I m having a tough time figuring out the RSX equivalent.
I thought PIP would do it, ( PIP FOO.IMG=DL0: ) but that fails if the disk isn t mounted or if it s mounted as /FOREIGN. I don t think BRU or DSC understand non-ODS volumes, and I don t know any other utilities that copy files.
FWIW, the pack is from an ancient Unix and is not in Files11, RT11, or any other format that RSX knows about.
Otherwise my only choice will be to fire up the 730 so I can get an RL02 attached to a real operating system J
Thanks,
Bob
On 2013-07-05 21:27, Steve Davidson wrote:
Does anyone know where I can get the latest RSX-11M-Plus kit from? My
kit is unreadable and the system disk has died so...
Does anyone know who owns RSX anymore? I will go that route if necessary.
Reply directly please... Thanks!
trailing-edge have a disk image with the full kit, as far as I know.
Johnny
Does anyone know where I can get the latest RSX-11M-Plus kit from? My kit is unreadable and the system disk has died so... Does anyone know who owns RSX anymore? I will go that route if necessary. Reply directly please... Thanks! -Steve