Unibus to SCSI is probably your best bet.
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/cmd/CDU-720_May92.pdf
These are available on eBay for about a $1K last I looked. You'll need to poke around the VMS web sites for the drivers, but we had some of these on a couple Unibus machines, including a 780 a >>long<< time ago. I know no reason why it would work for a 730 - although you might need to sysgen on a working system to create the boot disk.
On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 10:21 AM, Bob Armstrong <bob at jfcl.com> 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
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
