11 Dec
2023
11 Dec
'23
7:10 p.m.
On 12/10/23 23:07, Johnny Billquist wrote:
I have the tape image that's floating around. But see below.
Excellent! The tape distribution is the only one that exists. It's meant
for all different types of machines and disks.
Ok, this clears up a longstanding misconception of mine. At the
beginning of the sysgen run for 4.8 on one of my systems, it says
"RL01/RL02 distribution kit". And I have a printed log of my very first
RSX-11M sysgen (I had typed 4.2 last night, but now I remember it was
4.1) back in 1986, and it says "RL01/RL02 distribution kit". I had
assumed, back then, that that was all that was on the tape, meaning it
was RL-specific.
So it was 1986, and I had gotten my very first PDP-11, an 11/34 with
two RL01s. It came with an RSX-11M v4.1 distribution tape, but no tape
drive. I had a friend and DEC mentor (Jim Gonzalez of Omni Systems, if
you know of him) who lived about 2hrs north of me. I was 17 and
couldn't drive yet, so I talked my grandmother into driving me, along
with that tape and a stack of RL01 packs, up to his place. He was kind
enough to restore the tape onto the disk packs on one of his systems.
Then I took the packs home and ran sysgen on my system.
If you know the band Genesis, their album Invisible Touch had just
come out, and they did a tour associated with that album. I had
attended a concert in Philadelphia on that tour, and got one of the
concert T-shirts. Some days before that, I had been working on that
sysgen, and I was talking about it quite a lot at work, including with
Richard Gilbert, our lab's VMS sysadmin.
So when I came in to work the day after the concert, proudly wearing
my new Genesis T-shirt, Richard saw it and laughed, and said "That shirt
should really say GEN-A-SYS!"
Anyway, from back then I had assumed that the tape I had contained
only the RL01/RL02 distribution kit. I never (then or now) read the
sysgen command procedures.
A year or two later I added an RK07 drive to that system, but I
installed RSTS/E v9.4 on that, not RSX.
Anyway...more below.
Always. :-) But it is a lot of work. I've always had one or more
RK07s at home, but the museum environment at LSSM is more demanding.
Visitors expect things to be clean, buttoned up, and functional. It's
not quite a datacenter production environment, but it's closer to that
than my systems at home, where it doesn't matter if there are cables
hanging around everywhere.
...
I think the 4.1 system was actually six RL01s. (I typed 4.2 above,
but it was late last night...I now remember that it was 4.1) I remember
it because I had (and still have) some nice wire "stands" for RL packs,
each of which holds six packs, and I took a full one up to Jim Gonzalez'
place to have him restore that distribution tape on his system.
Hey folks.
Does anyone have images of the RSX-11M v4.8 RK06/RK07
kit? I have the RL kit, but I would like to have the RK06/RK07 kit.
Not sure exactly what you are looking for here. The distribution as
such makes no difference. If you have it on tape, it installs on any
type of disk. LSSM has
several machines with RK07s, and I have one at home. We
have a great many RK07 disk packs. (like 40 or 50)
Oh. Ho ho... You're having fun, I see. Yes,
I've done that. But is it not the case that the sysgen
command procedures are different for the different disk distributions,
due to the way the files are broken up between volumes? The v4.8 RL
distribution specifically asks for the different volumes on DL1: and
DL2:.
We're talking about the installation you did from tape to RL, right? In
which case, the same tape can be used to install to RK. Really.
If you look at the tape, it looks like this: So when you install, you start by restoring the
saveset that is for your
type of disk, so you get a bootable system. And then you boot that,
which brings in all the rest, which is the same no matter which disk.
Ok. I just did that under simh to explore it a bit. It is (of
course) as you say; this dispels my long-held misconception that I
mentioned above: There aren't separate tapes for the distributions.
Interesting!
For
instance, on my first PDP-11 back in the 1980s, I had an
RSX-11M v4.2 distribution tape that was "the RL kit" that restored
onto five (or was it four) RL01 packs, and you booted the first one
and ran your sysgen. But there was also the "big disk kit" which
would run on any single disk that was big enough.
It's five RL02 packs. Seven if you have RL01. SGNTYP.CMD is probably of more interest to you. It is
different for each
type, and is then used to inform SYSGEN about what target disks it
should gear towards.
And THAT is where the flags are set to tell SYSGEN what type of kit
is present, even though it's actually the same kit, just a change of the
behavior of the command procedure as directed by those flags. I see!
The *simplest* way of doing this correctly would be to
have a machine
with RK07 and tape. Then you just follow the manual and install from
scratch. I guess that option is not viable.
Second would be to just have the tape available, and restore the DMSYS
to your RK07, and then run TAPEKIT to pull the rest down from the tape
to that disk.
We don't have a functional tape drive on that system (an 11/50) right
now, so I may do all of this under simh and then copy the disk image
over. That's handy as then we'll have a clean backup of that system
disk, which is important for the museum environment in case someone
breaks something.
Thank you for clearing up my misconception!
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA