23 Feb
2002
23 Feb
'02
11:18 p.m.
Hi guys,
Sridhar showed me some VAXen today and i was hooked. I've gotta have one
:). I was wondering if any of you have a MicroVAX 4000/VLC?
Thanks,
torquil
4:23 a.m.
Sridhar showed me some VAXen today and i
was hooked. I've
gotta have one :). I was wondering if any of you have a MicroVAX 4000/VLC?
What had you hooked? OpenVMS or the hardware? A VAXstation 4000/VLC is a
very nice VAX, but if it's the OS, you might really want to consider
looking for a DEC Alpha. Of course if size or money is a consideration you
don't get much better than the VLC. Other VAXstation 4000's to consider
would be the Models 60, 90, 90A, and 96 (good luck finding a 96, and even
90A's can be difficult to find), however, they're all a much larger desktop
unit.
Personally if I was going to have one OpenVMS system I'd be more interested
in an Alpha though. My DEC PWS 433au is the size of a smallish x86 tower,
and it rocks!
You'll also want to have a look at the following:
http://www.montagar.com/hobbyist/index.html
http://www.openvms.compaq.com:8000/
http://anacin.nsc.vcu.edu/~jim/mvax/mvax_faq.html
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
5:27 a.m.
I am looking for a VAXstation 4000/VLC in particular because of its VAXness
and its small form factor.... i could get an alpha but.... "its not a VAX"
----- Original Message -----
From: "Zane H. Healy" <healyzh(a)aracnet.com>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Sunday, February 24, 2002 1:23 PM
Subject: Re: MicroVAX 4000/VLC
> Sridhar showed me some VAXen today and i was hooked. I've
>gotta have one :). I was wondering if any of you have a MicroVAX
4000/VLC?
What had you hooked? OpenVMS or the hardware? A VAXstation 4000/VLC is a
very nice VAX, but if it's the OS, you might really want to consider
looking for a DEC Alpha. Of course if size or money is a consideration
you
don't get much better than the VLC. Other
VAXstation 4000's to consider
would be the Models 60, 90, 90A, and 96 (good luck finding a 96, and even
90A's can be difficult to find), however, they're all a much larger
desktop
unit.
Personally if I was going to have one OpenVMS system I'd be more
interested
in an Alpha though. My DEC PWS 433au is the size of a
smallish x86 tower,
and it rocks!
You'll also want to have a look at the following:
http://www.montagar.com/hobbyist/index.html
http://www.openvms.compaq.com:8000/
http://anacin.nsc.vcu.edu/~jim/mvax/mvax_faq.html
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
25 Feb
25 Feb
6:58 a.m.
--- "Zane H. Healy" <healyzh(a)aracnet.com> wrote:
Personally if I was going to have one OpenVMS system
I'd be more
interested in an Alpha though. My DEC PWS 433au is the size of a
smallish x86 tower, and it rocks!
I'm a long-time VMS user, and I have an Alpha - a Noname AXPpci133
board I got many years ago that was at one time the fastest computer
in my house. I have a flavor of *BSD on it because I didn't know how
to bring it up from install media when I got it (3+ years ago) and
the BSD that's on it was available as a 400MB disk image... I dropped
an ST1480 on a Sun, "gzip | dd..." and I had a bootable Alpha disk.
Did the guy doing the OpenVMS port to the AXPpci133 ever get it working
enough to use?
-ethan
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Sports - Coverage of the 2002 Olympic Games
http://sports.yahoo.com
7:16 a.m.
Personally if
I was going to have one OpenVMS system I'd be more
interested in an Alpha though. My DEC PWS 433au is the size of a
smallish x86 tower, and it rocks!
I'm a long-time VMS user, and I have an Alpha - a Noname AXPpci133
board I got many years ago that was at one time the fastest computer
in my house. I have a flavor of *BSD on it because I didn't know how
to bring it up from install media when I got it (3+ years ago) and
the BSD that's on it was available as a 400MB disk image... I dropped
an ST1480 on a Sun, "gzip | dd..." and I had a bootable Alpha disk.
Did the guy doing the OpenVMS port to the AXPpci133 ever get it working
enough to use? 
8:12 a.m.
On Mon, 25 Feb 2002, Ethan Dicks wrote:
Did the guy doing the OpenVMS port to the AXPpci133 ever get it working
enough to use?
I've sort of been wondering, since we're on AXP anyway, is anybody at
all still running Tru64 or NT on Alpha?
Everyone I know who owns AXP runs either *BSD or Linux or OpenVMS,
including me. NetBSD flat screams on the LX164.
Doc
8:42 a.m.
New subject: Alpha AXP (was Re: MicroVAX 4000/VLC)
--- Doc <doc(a)mdrconsult.com> wrote:
On Mon, 25 Feb 2002, Ethan Dicks wrote:
I never had Tru64 media. I do have NT 3.51 media for Alpha, but I've
never been interested in allocating a pile of brain cells to learn it
when I have other uses I'd rather put that much grey matter to.
Did the guy doing the OpenVMS port to the AXPpci133 ever get it working
enough to use?
I've sort of been wondering, since we're on AXP anyway, is anybody at
all still running Tru64 or NT on Alpha? Everyone I know who owns AXP runs either *BSD or
Linux or OpenVMS,
including me. NetBSD flat screams on the LX164.
Nothing screamed on my AXPpci133 until I found enough old cache chips
that the board liked. There's a list of "approved vendors" for those
cache chips... they aren't kidding... I had to try parts from four or
five old 486 motherboards to get a set of cache SRAMs that would let
the Alpha boot. Much happier now. Wish I had 1MB, but 256MB is lots
better than nothing. Can't complain, though. 4 or so years ago, I got
the board and a 166MHz CPU chip, no RAM, no cache, for $80. The RAM
was about $1/meg, a few at a time from Dayton. The cache was free,
eventually. I haven't done much with it, beyond get it up and running.
I don't think I even got a NIC working in it. I bought a real DEC
10BaseT NIC (DE405?) at Dayton, but I think I left it and the rest of
the stuff in that plastic bag on a vendor's table.
Until I have a pressing need for 64 bits, I will probably keep this
box at a low priority, but if any of the PDP-10 emulators would
rather be on a medium to slow-speed 64-bit machine rather than on a
medium to fast 32-bit machine, I might dust it off. I just don't see
where it's anything besides cool for the sake of cool right now.
-ethan
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Sports - Coverage of the 2002 Olympic Games
http://sports.yahoo.com
9:28 a.m.
New subject: Alpha AXP (was Re: MicroVAX 4000/VLC)
On 25-Feb-2002 Ethan Dicks wrote:
I've the "OEM Design Guide" for the AXPpci33, so
if anyone needs the
"list of approved vendors" (or other information like this) I can
look it up.
bye
Thilo
--
There was no marketing in the good old days, which is why they were
the good old days.
Everyone I
know who owns AXP runs either *BSD or Linux or OpenVMS,
including me. NetBSD flat screams on the LX164.
Nothing screamed on my AXPpci133 until I found enough old cache chips
that the board liked. There's a list of "approved vendors" for those
cache chips... they aren't kidding... I had to try parts from four or
five old 486 motherboards to get a set of cache SRAMs that would let
the Alpha boot. Much happier now. Wish I had 1MB, but 256MB is lots
better than nothing. 
6:08 p.m.
New subject: Alpha AXP (was Re: MicroVAX 4000/VLC)
Thilo Schmidt wrote:
On 25-Feb-2002 Ethan Dicks wrote:
>> Everyone I know who owns AXP runs either *BSD or Linux or OpenVMS,
>> including me. NetBSD flat screams on the LX164.
>
> Nothing screamed on my AXPpci133 until I found enough old cache chips
> that the board liked. There's a list of "approved vendors" for those
> cache chips... they aren't kidding... I had to try parts from four or
> five old 486 motherboards to get a set of cache SRAMs that would let
> the Alpha boot. Much happier now. Wish I had 1MB, but 256MB is lots
> better than nothing.
Last year I bought two AXPpci133 and after some trouble I managed
to get OpenVMS 7.2 Hobbyist installed. With an real DEC nic I also
installed TCP/IP on it however it is really unreliable even for
hobbyist use. For some unknown reason I could never run it with 64M
of ram with the DE203 nic but only 48M. It bugchecks frequently, so
I really prefer my old VAXstation 3100 which is REALLY reliable.
A freind of mine also bough one of these AXPpci133 and used it a while
with linux but it was a slow poke (spelling??) maybe it works well
only with NT (yuck) of Tru64 (never tried it)
e.
==================================================================
Enrico Badella email: enrico.badella(a)softstar.it
Soft*Star srl eb(a)vax.cnuce.cnr.it
InterNetworking Specialists tel: +39-011-746092
Via Camburzano 9 fax: +39-011-746487
10143 Torino, Italy
Wanted, for hobbyist use, any type of PDP and microVAX hardware,software,
manuals,schematics,etc. and DEC-10 docs or manuals
==========================================================================
8:56 a.m.
I've sort of been wondering, since we're on
AXP anyway, is anybody at
all still running Tru64 or NT on Alpha?
I've got a system running Tru64.
Everyone I know who owns AXP runs either *BSD or
Linux or OpenVMS,
including me. NetBSD flat screams on the LX164.
If you want to run Unix on an Alpha, try Tru64 (available
under the enthusiast's license). Tru64 runs very well,
and it's very advanced. Much better than HP/UX, and as
far as I've seen (just really got started) Solaris.
--
Eric Dittman
dittman(a)dittman.net
Check out the DEC Enthusiasts Club at http://www.dittman.net/
8:58 a.m.
I've sort of been wondering, since we're on
AXP anyway, is anybody at
all still running Tru64 or NT on Alpha?
Everyone I know who owns AXP runs either *BSD or Linux or OpenVMS,
including me. NetBSD flat screams on the LX164.
Doc
I'm not running Tru64, but I've got a friend that does on one of his
Alpha's. To the best of my knowledge he's not running Linux or any BSD
varient on any of them. He also runs OpenVMS.
I've got a HD with NT on it, but that machine is currently not being used at
all. I've got two Alpha's that run 24x365, one runs OpenBSD, the other runs
OpenVMS. The rest of my Alpha's and VAXen are currently unused. The system
running OpenBSD will probably be downgraded from a AlphaStation 200 4/233 to
a Sparc 5/110 as I've got better cards for the Sparc than I do for the
Alpha.
Zane
9:34 a.m.
New subject: Tru64 (was: Re: MicroVAX 4000/VLC)
On 2002.02.25 23:12 Doc wrote:
I've sort of been wondering, since we're on
AXP anyway, is anybody
at all still running Tru64 or NT on Alpha?
I am runing Tru64 5.1 on a PWS 500au.
Everyone I know who owns AXP runs either *BSD or
Linux or OpenVMS,
including me. NetBSD flat screams on the LX164.
If NetBSD gets
1) a cc(1) that generates as fast and optimal code as the Tru64 cc(1)
2) a file sytem that is that fast, flexible and reliable as AdvFS[1]
3) a X-Server for my PowerStorm 4D50T graphics card[2] with suitable
acceleration
I will switch to NetBSD.
[1] AdvFS is jornaled. A mounted FS can grow, shrink, be moved to an
other disk, spreed across multiple disks to get more capacity...
Snapshots / Clones can be taken... Remark: This are features of the FS,
not an underlying LVM.
[2] The 4d50T is similar in performance to the SGI Indigo2 HighImpact.
--
tsch??,
Jochen
Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/
10:01 a.m.
New subject: Tru64 (was: Re: MicroVAX 4000/VLC)
On Tue, 26 Feb 2002, Jochen Kunz wrote:
2) a file sytem that is that fast, flexible and
reliable as AdvFS[1]
er..
[1] AdvFS is jornaled. A mounted FS can grow, shrink,
be moved to an
other disk, spreed across multiple disks to get more capacity...
Snapshots / Clones can be taken... Remark: This are features of the FS,
not an underlying LVM.
AdvFS ALSO has serious race conditions at least as recently as 4.0G.
This was our (the SA's) number-one huge support headache at Amazon.com for
_months_. (I think my NDA is expired by now, and anyway they're bragging
publically about being an HP shop these days). I cannot count how many
times we had to suck it up and restore filesystems from backup, because
the AdvFS had helpfully corrupted itself. At one point we were restoring
three or four filesystems a week...
Compaq was no help.
Over the course of six months and thousands of man-hours wasted due to
roached filesystems, their story went from "There are no bugs in AdvFS,"
to "We admit the existence of race conditions in the AdvFS code," to "We
fixed it in 4.0f," to "We fixed it in 4.0g," to "we still can't
find the
last race conditions, we probably won't have it fixed until 5.0."
No thanks.
Not on topic, anyway, since this was mid- to late-1999.
ok
r.
9:05 p.m.
New subject: Tru64 (was: Re: MicroVAX 4000/VLC)
On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 07:01:56PM -0500, r. 'bear' stricklin wrote:
AdvFS ALSO has serious race conditions at least as
recently as 4.0G.
Urgs! That is truely a SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN.
I use Tru64 (5.1) only on my private workstation, not in a heavy
load production environment.
Compaq was no help.
No surprise. Comcrap is not
DEC.
--
tsch??,
Jochen
Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/
3 p.m.
New subject: Tru64 (was: Re: MicroVAX 4000/VLC)
On Tue, 26 Feb 2002, Jochen Kunz wrote:
On 2002.02.25 23:12 Doc wrote:
gcc keeps on getting better, so that might reasonably happen.
I've sort of been wondering, since
we're on AXP anyway, is anybody
at all still running Tru64 or NT on Alpha?
I am runing Tru64 5.1 on a PWS 500au.
Everyone I know who owns AXP runs either *BSD
or Linux or OpenVMS,
including me. NetBSD flat screams on the LX164.
If NetBSD gets
1) a cc(1) that generates as fast and optimal code as the Tru64 cc(1) 2) a file sytem that is that fast, flexible and
reliable as AdvFS[1]
Have you tried using Linux's LVM? I havent yet (lacking the extra hdd's
to screw with mainly), but it's supposed to be fairly workable, and from
what I've heard, it'll do all that pretty effectively. Of course, it's
not quite a filesystem, but if combined with ext3, it would probably be a
pretty viable solution. Anyhow, why do you need to have just one
filesystem unless everything is just stuck in one directory? I just end
up mounting the physical drives and using symlinks to put data from
'large' directories onto extra filesystems. Anyhow, it's nicer to have
just one fs fail with only a portion of the data instead of the one fs
with everythign on it....
[1] AdvFS is jornaled. A mounted FS can grow, shrink,
be moved to an
other disk, spreed across multiple disks to get more capacity...
Snapshots / Clones can be taken... Remark: This are features of the FS,
not an underlying LVM.
See note above about potential data loss from only having one filesystem.
tschüß,
Jochen
-- Pat
10:06 p.m.
New subject: Tru64 (was: Re: MicroVAX 4000/VLC)
On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 12:00:35AM -0500, Pat Finnegan wrote:
gcc keeps on getting better, so that might reasonably
happen.
OK. I am no compiler expert, but I doubt that. GCC is a big monster.
Its main advantage is that it supports lots of target CPUs,
but that is also a problem. I think it will never be that good
like a compiler that targets only one CPU and is highly optimized
for that CPU. See the MIPS Pro cc...
Have you tried using Linux's LVM?
We are
using it on a production machine (dual PIII, 3/4GB RAM) with
450GB Hardware RAID and lots of our workstations.
Of course, it's not quite a filesystem, but if
combined with ext3,
it would probably be a pretty viable solution.
We are using the SGI XFS on the
LVMs. I didn't want to use ext3,
as it was marked highly experimental (At least more experimental
than XFS.) and it suffers from the same problems like ext2:
2GB file size limit, fix number of inodes, slower, ...
XFS has nice features like on line resizeing (A file system
_must_ be mounted to grow) and is faster then ext2/3, but the
buffer cache that comes with XFS is a bit, uhm, "strange"...
reiserfs needs to be tweaked to store files larger than 2GB
and has no quota support. (We need quotas and I consider a
*ix file system that has no quotas as incomplete.)
Our test of IBM JFS was a debacle.
Anyhow, why do you need to have just one
filesystem unless everything is just stuck in one directory?
Did I say that I put
everything in one FS?
One advantage of AdvFS is the distinction from file system storge and
file system namespace. You put a file domain on a disk partition (or
LVM). Then you create one or more file sets in this file domain. The
file set is the actual file system, that gets mounted. The storage
space that this file set needs, both file data and file system meta
data, are allocated from the file domain. If you have multiple
file sets in a file domain, they share the available storage space.
Of course you can put quotas on file sets to limmit the total amount
a file set can allocate below the free space of the file domain.
e.g. You create a file domain for /var and have distinct file sets
for /var, /var/spool, /var/tmp, /var/adm... You don't have to waste
the max. amount of data that a singe file system may need for every
partition. You create a file domain, that is big enough to hold
the average space for each file set. If a file set needs temporarily
more space, it gets this from the "overhead" space of the other
file sets.
--
tsch??,
Jochen
Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/
8335
days inactive
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days old
16 comments
11 participants
participants (11)
-
dittman＠dittman.net -
doc＠mdrconsult.com -
enrico.badella＠softstar.it -
erd_6502＠yahoo.com -
healyzh＠aracnet.com -
jkunz＠unixag-kl.fh-kl.de -
pat＠purdueriots.com -
red＠bears.org -
thilo.schmidt＠unix-ag.uni-siegen.de -
torquil＠rockbridge.net -
vance＠ikickass.org