[HECnet] disk loading success

[Please forgive the cross-post...I don't think all of the "social" people on the HECnet list are actually on the DECtec list (yet). I believe this to be a general-interest post.] I just did something cool. I've long been in need of a more convenient way of loading up system disks for real PDP-11 and VAX systems, and I've finally come up with one. It's dead simple. Initially I had wanted to set up a MicroVAX running NetBSD for stuff like this, but NetBSD/vax has had a lot of problems in more recent releases, and is becoming rather slow and bloated. (I never thought I'd see myself say that about NetBSD...I've been running it since v0.9!) Yesterday I fired up a simh PDP-11 instance, installed RSTS/E v10.1 on an RA90-sized disk image, and used Linux' DECnet support to copy it over to my VAX-7000. The VAX-7000 has an HSJ50-based disk subsystem, but it also has a pair of KDM70 SDI controllers. It is running VMS v7.3. I plugged an RA90 into the VAX-7000, did a mount/foreign on it, and copied the disk image over to the raw device. I started up a simh PDP-11 on the VAX-7000, attached device rq0 to the raw physical RA90 drive, and booted it. It booted and ran normally! Then, armed with confidence from that success, I dismounted and unplugged the RA90 from the VAX-7000 and plugged it into a PDP-11/44 (2MB, FPP, CIS, UDA50) and booted it. That worked too! =) (Now of course I could do the same with a Qbus PDP-11, with a KDA50 SDI controller.) My first desire was to do the actual RSTS/E install under simh on the VAX-7000 directly to the raw device, but that crashed for reasons unknown. Mark Pizzolato told me that it was unlikely to work, so I may not investigate that any further. Tonight, I will likely put together a VAX4000-700 in a BA440 chassis with DSSI drives. Into that I will put a KDA50 (I have an S-box KDA50 distribution panel) and use that in the role of the VAX-7000 for this type of stuff in the future. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA