On Dec
10, 2021, at 2:32 PM, cyb 2600<cyb2600 at gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
A little while ago I purchased an HP BL860c server blade. It has an Itanium 2
CPU
and I was able to install OpenVMS 8.4 on it. However I do NOT have a HP
Bladesystem chassis to put the blade in, meaning I can only connect to it via
the SUV console cable which provides usb, serial, and VGA. There's no way to
get ethernet out of the thing without plugging it into a rather gigantic
Bladesystem chassis that I don't have. If it was an x64 based blade running
windows I could just use a USB->Ethernet adapter but of course those things
don't have OpenVMS drivers.
Given ethernet's not an option, would there
be any way to tunnel DECNET
over the serial port? It seems like that was possible
on VAXen and maybe
even Alphas but I've no mention of doing it on an Itanium. Or if anybody else
has any ideas of how I could network this thing I would appreciate it.
I don't know that VMS ever did it, but a number of DECnet systems support
DDCMP over async lines (terminal serial ports). That's part of the standard.
VAX/VMS certainly did async DDCMP. I've no idea if that functionality got
migrated to Alpha and Itanium. I'd suggest you try following the VMS example.
If you can get the configuration steps to work (suggesting Itanium support) then
this should work with a serial line going into a simh VAX.
Good Luck,
- Mark