22 Apr
2011
22 Apr
'11
6:24 p.m.
At 3:23 PM -0700 4/22/11, CRC wrote:
E11 has been seriously looked at in the past, but the
required
additions and money constraints nixed going in that direction.
Whenever time permits he has been looking at alternates to the
current hardware. However, this system which has a rack of Fuji
Eagles and a number of tape decks, has been running without much
repair maintenance for the last several decades. We recently had to
work on one of the Fujis and now are in the process of shot-gunning
all the caps. We were totally amazed when one of the drives became
flakey and found that nearly all the caps were bad - luckily Earl W.
Muntz didn't work for Fuji...
Definitely a project for a later date, and this also indicates that
the system might be of sufficient size and complexity that it might
actually be worth continuing to run on real hardware. I'm usually
the one pointing out such systems still exist in the wild, but I have
to admit the magnitude of this setup surprises me a little.
However, the current problem is not transporting the
applications,
but contacting the current system. Remember that RSTS is multiuser
and he has no intention of also transporting his drones that also
access the computer to the cool mountains with him :) There are also
a number of customers that dial in to get access to data.
Has anyone used any of the serial port ethernet servers (aka port
directors) and how well did they work?
Now that we have more details I'd say that the best solution is
either this, or else a dedicated low-end x86 PC running OpenBSD. In
either case the 'fun' part could very well be wiring the two
together. Honestly I'd recommend a PC with OpenBSD over a Serial
Port ethernet server.
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| | Photographer |
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