11 Dec
2021
11 Dec
'21
3:19 p.m.
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.
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.
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