Introduction and two new systems online - HECnet

6 Jun 2016

Hi all,

My name is Lex van Roon, and for quite some time I've been lurking on
this list as a DEC/VMS enthusiast and today I got my link to HECnet
working with the help of Johnny.

Somewhere during the 90s, a high-school classmate of mine gave me a couple of
copies of Hacktic(*). In there I read about these operating systems with
weird names like VMS and UNIX, and since I only knew MS based OS's back
then, I was intrigued. I soon got my first Linux box running under x86,
and not long thereafter I got my first whitelabel Alpha mainboard, on
which I happily ran BSD and Linux. After dropping out of school, I went
to work as a sysadmin in the UNIX world during the end of the dotcom boom,
and nowadays I'm a DevOps engineer working for a large dutch .com.

As a hobby, I've been running various Alpha's (and other RISC iron) over
the years:

- Whitelabel AXPCI133
- AS1000 (lots of them)
- PWS 466au
- DS10/DS20/DS25
- ES47

and since a couple of years, I finally wiped UNIX off my Alpha's and
installed VMS, and have used them for various things. Mostly replicating
services I'd normally run under UNIX (dns, ntp, http), but also for
software development in C and Python(**). In this time, I've discovered
that it's very helpful to know people who know VMS very well (thnx
Steven Hoffman), and I am confident enough about my VMS skills
that I decided to join, since being in a DECnet with my own systems is
not such an interesting learning experience as working with 'the real
thing' :)

For now I'm online with the following two Alpha's:

REI / 1.540 / AlphaServer DS10 / 466MHz / 1GB ram / 2 x 18GB u2w 10k
PAI / 1.541 / AlphaServer DS25E / 1GHz / 1GB ram / 6 x 73GB u320 15k

In the future, I plan/hope to get my VAX 4000/200 connected, but that
system still needs some TLC before it will operate. Most likely I will
also spin up some emulated instances of various other DEC operating
systems in the future, for learning/discovery purposes.

The systems are connected to a 100mbit FttH uplink, located in Amersfoort,
The Netherlands and are available 24/7. I have not yet configured any guest
accounts, but I intend to do this.

Kind Regards,

Lex van Roon

*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack-Tic
**) https://github.com/r3boot/pki

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