11 Mar
2016
11 Mar
'16
3:42 a.m.
If you get TCP/IP networking like Multinet (ie
not like CMUIP) running, you
should be able to use FTP, rcp or maybe even TFTP to move a VMS BACKUP save
set to another system. The snag is you need enough scratch space to create
the saveset on the 11/730 before you transfer it.
Well, there's the problem: I don't have scratch space, since all of the hard
drives are precisely what I want to image. C-Kermit for
VMS might be able to do this - I can't recall.
Getting it onto the machine in the first place might be a challenge!
I can boot either 7.3 from the R80 fixed drive, or 5.2 from an RL02 pack. So
in theory, I should be able to boot from each of them to image the other.
There might be TCP/IP support on the 7.3 installation, but I doubt there's
any TCP/IP support on the 5.2. I hope that the DECNET support is there on
both installations for the ethernet card.
I set up a VM on my Mac running Ubuntu with DECNET support installed.
Despite being orphaned several years ago, it still seems to run. So I think
that trying to bring up DECNET on the VAX might give me options. I was
thinking that if nothing else, if I can log into the VAX remotely via DECNET
and log the terminal output, then maybe I could just DUMP a foreign-mounted
volume and then write some throw-away program to transmogrify the hex dump
into a block-level image. It would be slow, but I hope it would at least be
quite a bit faster than dumping over an async serial port.
If I can write a file from the VAX to that Ubuntu VM via DECNET, then maybe I
can just COPY a foreign-mounted volume to a file on the VM. I don't know what
capabilities the Linux DECNET support gives me yet, but if I can do this then
that should be a good option. I wonder if I can image tapes that way, too?
COPY will give up if it encounters a bad block on the disk and it will also be
difficult to ensure the resulting image is a valid copy of the disk. BACKUP to
a saveset over DECnet will keep going despite errors and will also include
extra overhead to allow the integrity of the saveset to be verified in case it
gets damaged later. Using BACKUP will also allow restores of particular files
to be done if required rather than having to restore the whole disk even if
only a small number of files are damaged or inadvertently deleted.
Clustering is
pretty simple when you know how but if you don't want to get into
configuring a cluster, a DECnet connected system or emulated system would
probably be the way to go. Configuring DECnet on VMS can be done very easily
with surprisingly little understanding of what is going on and is less
invasive than configuring a cluster.
You had me at "surprisingly little understanding of what is going on"! This
sounds like the thing for me to try next.
On VMS, any
file, including a BACKUP saveset can be specified as being located
on a remote DECnet node, so it is possible to run BACKUP on your 11/730 and have
the output saveset situated on a different VAX / Alpha / Itanium / emulated
system running VMS or on a unix or other system capable of running DECnet well,
(ultrix?), even a PC/Macintosh running DOS/Windows/Macos and DEC Pathworks.
That sounds very promising!
Thanks for all of the suggestions! I still have a lot of learning curve to
climb in the VMS world.
Send me an email if you need more details on any of the above.
Regards,
Peter Coghlan.