11 Dec
2021
11 Dec
'21
3:30 p.m.
On 12/11/21 9:19 AM, cyb 2600 wrote:
Yes, it?s the console line. The blade has an ?SUV?
connector on the
front that splits into a serial port, vga and two USB ports. I?ll run
a ?show dev? and see what kind of device openVMS thinks it is. I can
use the vga and usb keyboard/mouse as the console instead once it
boots past all the EFI stuff.
What is a "GBX" signal connector at the rear ?
https://hugepdf.com/download/hp-integrity-bl860c-specifications-5b1fda51076…
https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=emr_na-c02230214
(870c - probably close enough)
These blades were never designed to be ran outside of
a chassis so I?m
trying to make it do something it was never designed to do.? But it
was only $60 on eBay so I thought it would be a fun project.
Did the $60 include the processors and memory?
Best,
/s.
On Saturday, December 11, 2021, Wilm Boerhout <wboerhout at gmail.com> wrote:
It is the console serial line on the Itanium if I followed this
correctly . Some regular console output may not be redirected and
disturb the DDCMP protocol.
Groet,
Wilm
(Verstuurd vanaf mijn telefoon, dus wat korter dan gewoonlijk.)
(Sent from my phone, so a bit more compact than usual)
--
Op 11 dec. 2021 om 12:55 heeft Johnny Billquist
<bqt at softjar.se>
het volgende geschreven:
?On 2021-12-10 20:32, cyb 2600 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.
Others have already said a lot. But to just add a little more.
As mentioned, at least on VAXen, you can run DECnet over a
serial line. It
might very well be possible also on Alpha and
Itanium. Check the docs. Even if it isn't officially supported,
just try turning it on. In VMS, the async DDCMP connections are
done over the normal terminal driver, so I would suspect there is
a fair chance it works, unless they actually ripped that code out.
However, if we talk HECnet, this isn't enough. You then need to
get that
serial looped back into something that can connect to
some remote side.
My original HECnet links were actually done this
way. I had
physical serial ports on machines, then then I had another machine
at each end to which the serial ports connected, and between these
two other machines, I ran a simple program that just forwarded the
bytes on the serial ports on both sides.
It worked, but of course this is slow, as it was just 9600 bps.
So eventually
I wrote my bridge program to just forward ethernet
packets instead.
But in your case, you'd need something like this again. I think
you might
be able to just hook it up to PyDECnet. It has DDCMP,
and I would hope it could be convinced to talk over an actual
serial port. If it can't, I'm sure Paul could fix that.
? 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