On Mon, 15 Jul 2013, Bob Armstrong wrote:
Does anybody have any other ideas? Who else has an old UNIBUS VAX? What
are you doing to disk drives?
You could rig up a MASSBUS-compatible controller that interfaces with either full SCSI/IDE drives or images on said drive similar to how that one museum does it.
I'd love to see your -11/730 working on HECnet!
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
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
No affiliation, caveat emptor etc. but these look very nice for 250GBP delivered:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/281135868757
--
Mark Benson
http://DECtec.info
Twitter: @DECtecInfo
HECnet: STAR69::MARK
Online Resource & Mailing List for DEC Enthusiasts.
>> but an RM80 will work fine off of the RB730 controller.
> Not exactly - I knew that the R80, RA80 and RM80 are all the same drive except for the personality modules. Certainly the HDAs are all the same. The >R80 essentially has no personality the RB730 does all the work. I guess the RM80 must have the MASSBUS controller in a separate box? So the >actual drive is like the 730 it has no personality module inside?
From what I recall, the RM80 was "personalityless" as well - the massbus guts must have been outside the disk drive. RM80s had the same "SMD-ish" connectors that the real R80 had, and plugged in and worked fine. I remember poring over the drawings for the RB730 at the time, wondering if a plain non-DEC SMD drive would have worked - it looked like it might have, except the RB730 had some capability to control bad blocks that a normal SMD drive wouldn't support. Never got a change to plug in an SMD drive and see what would happen.
>> My first home machine was an 11/725, to which I added an RB730 controller ,
>>and I used it with an RM80 for a number of years, until power problems killed
>> a bunch of boards in it.
> Do you still have it? I have some spare boards (or alternative, I also have a 725 that needs a new chassis :-)
Nope, had to let it go - it was years ago, and at the time, I didn't have the space to keep it once it was dead (to make space for it in the first place, I had removed the stove from my apartment - I mean, which was more use to me? Needless to say this all predated cheaply available VAXstations). I kept the good cards, and the VS100. As a "one of these days" project, if I never get another UNIBUS VAX, I'd like to burn some new ROMs for the VS100 controller box - it looks like it would make a middlin' fair 68000 system all on its own.
--
Lee K. Gleason N5ZMR
Control-G Consultants
lee.gleason at gmail.com
It been a long time, so I just don't remember if they worked out the box or not on VMS. We mostly ran UNIX on Vaxen in those days, but did have a couple of VMS boxes and frankly I've forgotten which things needed special drivers and which did not. I remember that for some of the HW we had, we had to add patches/drivers.
But what I was pointing out is that Unibus to SCSI is very possible (although might be pricey ;-) But I have to believe the SW to support it should be reasonable easy to find if it does not work out of the box.
If you have SCSI, you should be able to find storage to attach that would be reasonably cheap, reliable and maintainable.
Clem
As a side note: Just last week, I spliced a PCI/SCSI to a fairly modern INTEL*64 (*BSD UNIX) system, so we could retrieve some data from some 25 year old QIC tapes and were successful at recovering some historical stuff from the old days. We had one HW failure which I did was lucky to have a second drive, and of the 5 tapes brought to me, we had 2 media failures on one tape (which we got around and lost only two small files) and two tapes, I had to replace the rubber bands on from two new tapes I had, but once done - we recovered those tapes 100%
On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 11:43 AM, <Paul_Koning at dell.com> wrote:
On Jul 15, 2013, at 11:17 AM, Bob Armstrong wrote:
>> http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/cmd/CDU-720_May92.pdf
>> These are available on eBay for about a $1K last I looked.
>
> Eeek!
>
>> You'll need to poke around the VMS web sites for the drivers
>
> Looks like it does MSCP - I don't know why you'd need special drivers
> unless maybe to support non-standard sized drives.
That shouldn't matter either. MSCP gets the device size from the device; one of the big points of MSCP is to do logical block addressing and leave geometry as a device detail. I'd be surprised if VMS got this wrong...
paul
On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 11:46 AM, Kari Uusim ki
<uusimaki at exdecfinland.org> wrote:
On 14.7.2013 14:15, Cory Smelosky 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!)
There used to be Pathworks for Novell Netware. A Netware (3.12) server
instance running on VMS. It was talking IPX.
Kari
Hello!
Oddly enough I remember seeing it demonstrated at a trade show. About
the same time that the pest that became Windows NT (on MIPS and Alpha)
was being discussed. In fact I did ask what about it, made it
different then the regular example Pathworks. Let's just say the
response was an interesting one.
-----
Now why are the Yeti gathered all around your place Cory?
----
Dave don't do that.... Even if I was there, I wouldn't do that. But
oddly enough there is someone out there who calls himself the Doctor,
must be an earlier version of myself. And with backup, that's Liz Shaw
staring at you strangely.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On 14.7.2013 14:15, Cory Smelosky 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!)
There used to be Pathworks for Novell Netware. A Netware (3.12) server instance running on VMS. It was talking IPX.
Kari
On Jul 15, 2013, at 11:17 AM, Bob Armstrong wrote:
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/cmd/CDU-720_May92.pdf
These are available on eBay for about a $1K last I looked.
Eeek!
You'll need to poke around the VMS web sites for the drivers
Looks like it does MSCP - I don't know why you'd need special drivers
unless maybe to support non-standard sized drives.
That shouldn't matter either. MSCP gets the device size from the device; one of the big points of MSCP is to do logical block addressing and leave geometry as a device detail. I'd be surprised if VMS got this wrong...
paul
There has been a SA7x rackmount enclosure for RA7x disks. About the same size as RA9x enclosures. Very similar to SF7x enclosures.
I think you could find SA7x's from the large brokers who have old DEC hardware for sale. I guess the pricing would be reasonable.
Kari
On 15.7.2013 17:21, Bob Armstrong wrote:
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
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/cmd/CDU-720_May92.pdf
These are available on eBay for about a $1K last I looked.
Eeek!
You'll need to poke around the VMS web sites for the drivers
Looks like it does MSCP - I don't know why you'd need special drivers
unless maybe to support non-standard sized drives.
Bob
but an RM80 will work fine off of the RB730 controller.
Not exactly - I knew that the R80, RA80 and RM80 are all the same drive except for the personality modules. Certainly the HDAs are all the same. The R80 essentially has no personality the RB730 does all the work. I guess the RM80 must have the MASSBUS controller in a separate box? So the actual drive is like the 730 it has no personality module inside?
My first home machine was an 11/725, to which I added an RB730 controller ,
and I used it with an RM80 for a number of years, until power problems killed
a bunch of boards in it.
Do you still have it? I have some spare boards (or alternative, I also have a 725 that needs a new chassis :-)
Bob
