MicroVax II/VMS - why 70mb isn't enough.

Well, Sridhar and I spent yesterday doing some tinkering - I brought over my MicroVax II and we attempted to load VMS onto it. Easier said than done. By shuffleing parts around (and some considerable work getting ribbon cables through the bulkhead of a BA23), I was able to get a Microvax II configured with: Ethernet, ESDI w/ 70mb hard disk, and a TK50. I brought this Vax to Sridhar's house. The general consensus both here and on the netbsd list seems to be that the only way to boot/install a Vax is through MOP, over Ethernet. Well, now that I found Ethernet, it should have been simple. Sridhar has a Dec InfoServer 1000. This is a really cool little device the size of a CDROM player that can connect to a SCSI CD drive, and Ethernet, and be bootable by networked Vaxen. So, we cabled everything up, and immediately hit a snag. The InfoServer won't see the CDROM. In fact, it won't even boot right if there's a CD drive connected. We tried other CD drives, other cables, played with termination, everything. I discovered that the machine wouldn't boot if you just had a terminated cable plugged into it. The connectors are clearly labeled and keyed - no chance of mixing that up. A last ditch effort was to take a non-keyed cable, and purposely insert it backwards on one end. And it worked. So, if anyone is trying to connect a drive to an InfoServer 1000 using the 50 pin SCSI header on the InfoServer's board - that connector is BACKWARD! You must use a non-keyed cable and plug it in BACKWARD in order to make it work. After getting that going, and getting all the commands correct to boot the Vax off the InfoServer - all seemed well. Do the base restore set from the InfoServer, boot from the hard disk, follow the prompts and install the rest of the distribution. This is a 70mb ESDI disk, so after the base load, I had about 65000 blocks free. According to the installer, the Library, Help and DecNet phase IV will fit, just barely, with 300 blocks to spare. It won't. The installer runs out of space and crashes horribly. Reboot, reinstall base, back into installer, select only Library and DecNet IV. This leaves nearly 11000 free blocks according to the installer. This does not fit either, running out of disk during installation. At this point, it was 3:30 AM. We decided to call it a day (night?). Maybe I'll try NetBSD again. There has to be a way to get an OS onto a Vax in 70 megabytes. -Ian