This means there's no boot files on DKB200. You might try to see if VMS was installed using a root directory other than SYS0. Try B/x0000000, where x is from 0 to F. -- Eric Dittman dittman(a)dittman.net

Actually I recommend getting a Encompass (DECUS) Membership if you don't already have one (I think you can still get a free one). Then getting the Hobbyist CD-ROM from Montagar. You'll need the membership anyway since I really doubt you've got any license PAKs. http://www.montagar.com/hobbyist/index.html Just checked, looks like Encompass membership is still free (I *really* needed to renew mine). http://www.decus.org/encompass/Membership/index.shtml They say the membership ID will be sent out via email within a week. So the sooner you get started the better probably. Once you have the ID you can get License PAK's and order the CD. You can also get CD's for versions other than V7.2 off of eBay. Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | healyzh(a)holonet.net (alternate) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

Since you have SCSI, your best bet is to get a CD-ROM drive and a copy of VMS on CD-ROM. Then you can install VMS and any layered products for which you have PAKs (when you join DECUS they will send you, on request, PAKs for most layered products) I suggest if you have a local surplus electronics place or perhaps a PC repair center that you scrounge around for a Toshiba SCSI CD-ROM drive. They will often work in this application. --Chuck At 10:27 PM 5/2/01 -0400, you wrote:

Remember it needs to be one that supports 512-byte blocks, instead of the standard 2048-byte. If it's Sun-Bootable, it should work just fine. Since I suspect you've got a wacky SCSI connector on the back of that machine you'll probably want to pop the hood and plug the CD-ROM at least temporarily into the internal cable. I've heard people have been having trouble, it might actually take a phone call from what I've heard. BTW, my membership had expired over a year ago, and I was still using my ID to get hobbyist PAK's. Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | healyzh(a)holonet.net (alternate) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

No, the SCSI connector is just a strange DEC-only format. It looks like a 68-pin SCSI connector, but it's not. You'll need the special SCSI cable to use external devices. -- Eric Dittman dittman(a)dittman.net

No, not flaky, I'm just wondering if the model you have has a non-standard one. I've never had any problem with my Non-Standard one, but then I've got the cable. Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | healyzh(a)holonet.net (alternate) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

Makes me wonder if my membership is still active or not. I never did much with it after being unable to get the TK50 on my MVII to recognize anything. Jeff -- Collector of Classic Microcomputers and Video Game Systems: Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757

healyzh skrev: I have no respect for a system which needs to be pampered before one may hit the power switch, so nowadays, I just flick the switch when I feel like it, be the system Windows, Mac or UNIX. Haven't had the opportunity with VMS yet. =) -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6a.

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At 12:28 PM 4/26/01 +0100, Iggy Drougge wrote: Even with today's journaling file systems, I'm puzzled by the shutdown message on my WinNT machine. It says something like "Writing unsaved data to disk". Why would some file system data remain in memory, even after minutes or hours of relative inactivity on the system? Even a few seconds would be an eternity for a CPU. Why would important data be deferred? My first suspicion is the registry. I suspect they're stuffing gunk back into it before shutdown. And then there's Win9x boxes that can't seem to shut down, ever, or some that seem to wait for a fail-safe timer to expire before they really shut down, while others seem to shut down nearly immediately. I don't see the point of not warning the OS that you're planning to hit the power button. You have no idea what scheduled event is about to write to the disk. Why not give it a chance? - John

At 05:10 PM 4/26/01 +0100, Kevin Murrell wrote: So why doesn't the message say "Halting system services"? :-) A message that suggests that critical data hasn't been written to disk isn't technically accurate, and I wouldn't call it marketing-friendly, either. Then again, it's not like WinNT is running the Space Station Alpha or anything really important. It's just my hard disk and data. - John

On Thu, 26 Apr 2001, John Foust wrote: I have to half-wonder if you're not being sarcastic here. The following is taken from the publicly available logs of the first ISS crew: FROM: ALPHA TO: MCC-H MCC-M HSG-M SHIP'S LOG 22 FEB The day really gets off to a bad start. The server connection to the net is down hard. We worked on it last night until 0100 and could not bring it up. We were doing the file server part of network reconfiguration yesterday. This moved the FS to the lab-we also extended the Ethernet lan from the Node into the lab (not part of the procedure). This allowed the server to rejoin the network without delay, rather than waiting much later when the RF access points are set up. The plan was working well, and the server was online from mid afternoon. At about 2200, we were reconfiguring some mail files which, with a lot of help from Windows NT, got put in the wrong place during the backup procedure. When we finished restoring the files, the network was down and would not come back up. We worked this for several hours. Finally, jiggling some cables brings just a part of the net back. (that really instills confidence in the stability of your network). So as of 0700, we have to use the OCA machine for daily planning. Fortunately, ground has uplinked everything to the OCA's directories, so at least we have what we need onboard. But when we try and print, the printer locks up. It is not happy with the net now either. So Shep and Sergei start trying to figure out what is going on. After trying lots of other computer tricks that don't work, we put another network card in the server and that seems to fix the server problem. We power cycle the printer and that comes back. We are having a hard time understanding the how and why, but everything is working. [...] -brian.

On Thu, 26 Apr 2001, John Foust wrote: Rocket scientist? Ahh well THAT'S their problem. On the next shuttle flight they really should be sending up a Haitian voodoo priest. -brian.

On Thu, 26 Apr 2001 jpero(a)sympatico.ca wrote: Yeah, I just hope Canadarm2 comes with the three fingers necessary to press the giant CTRL+ALT+DEL buttons on the side of the Destiny Laboratory module. -brian.

On 26 Apr 2001, Iggy Drougge wrote: If that UNIX is Solaris 8, be prepared to fskc some filesystems manually when you power it back on. Even on my FreeBSD box and older Sun 4 that's running Solaris 2.4, both of which tend to come back up without any problems after a power failure, I still try to do a proper shutdown and halt... and yes, I still issue three sync commands before halting the system. Laugh at this superstition if you want to, but doing that on my Ultra running Solaris 8 seems to be the only way to get it to prepare it for powering off so that I don't have to do a manual fsck that prompts me for a lot of repetetive questions. Has anyone else here found older versions of Solaris on older hardware to be more stable? Anyway, to those running UNIX systems who are used to PeeCees running simpler operating systems and software, a word of advice: UNIX systems often have many processes running, some of which very well may be in the middle of writing to your hard disk when you switch the system off without a proper shutdown... particularly if you've got lots of things running like a database, have lots of cron jobs, have Apache running, etc. But, if you enjoy flirting with disaster and have good backups... -- Copyright (C) 2001 R. D. Davis The difference between humans & other animals: All Rights Reserved an unnatural belief that we're above Nature & rdd(a)perqlogic.com 410-744-4900 her other creatures, using dogma to justify such http://www.perqlogic.com/rdd beliefs and to justify much human cruelty.

R. D. Davis skrev: NetBSD and OpenBSD boxes seem to boot fine, albeit slowly. So what if they're writing to disk? If they have proper file systems that won't really matter. Mind you, at least I always check that the drive lights aren't on. -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6a. Ky?suke: Jag heter Kurre, Kurre Carlsson! Jag: Det heter du inte alls!

On Thu, 26 Apr 2001, Paul Thompson wrote: That reminds me, I'd like to hear a parody of the song "Bubba Shot the Jukebox" called it "Bubba Shot his PeeCee"... [...] Bubba shot the Jukebox last night, Said it played a sad song and made him cry. [...] becomes... [...] Bubba shot his PeeCee last night, Said Windoze crashed real bad and lost his files. [...] RDD -- Copyright (C) 2001 R. D. Davis The difference between humans & other animals: All Rights Reserved an unnatural belief that we're above Nature & rdd(a)perqlogic.com 410-744-4900 her other creatures, using dogma to justify such http://www.perqlogic.com/rdd beliefs and to justify much human cruelty.

Of course they boot slowly, they've got to repair all the damage you did. Sheesh! <sigh> Kindly never apply for a job where I'm working. Zane

Just because they're not blinking the disk lights enough for you to see (btw there ARE NO DISK LIGHTS on Suns, Vaxes and some other systems we're talking about) doesn't mean there are not half-writen files that will lose data in the queue to be written. Also, on some older systems there's the risk of Write Current being asserted during disk controller power down causing spiral write (write current and write gate asserted while disk seeks to track 0 on controller reset. You're being a bit clue< here. You can swap PC keyboards and mice hot until you happen to blow the 5 volt fuse... and then you learn YOU AREN'T SUPPOSED TO. Geez. If the critical application has a file open and it loses it when you pull the power in an unexpected manor you could lose data. No question. It's true. -Bill -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT d? s+:+ a+ C+++ UB++++ P+ L+ E--- W++ N++ o K++ w--- O++ M+ V++ PS+ PE Y+ PGP t 5 X R- tv++ b+ DI++ D- G e++ h---- r+++ y++++ ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------ -- "Bill Gates is a Persian cat and a monocle away from being a villain in a James Bond movie" - Dennis Miller || bpechter(a)shell.monmouth.com

Well, none of my Sun boxes have disk lights, but since I'm almost exclusevely using StorageWorks shelves for disks on my OpenVMS systems, including one of the two VAXen currently in use, they do a fair amount of flashing. They defininitly do a bunch after I type SHUTDOWN. I think my two boxes of RA72's and RA73's also have lights, but it's been months since the MicroVAX III has been up, and it's now buried in the back of one of my Storage Units. Agreed, also. As for the Anti-Static I often don't take as good of precautions on that as I should, however, I make sure to never touch any conductors on the board, and that I touch metal on the case first. Plus I always have a good supply of antistatic bags around and always keep the boards, chips, or memory sticks in one. I should always use a Anti-Static strap, and I sometimes will, but not always :^( Still at least I'm taking some precautions. Interesting point here. On a related note, if you use a Mac, it's in your best interest to have a 3rd party disk check program and to check and optimize your filesystems regularly. Trust me, I know that you're likely to regret it if you don't! As much as I like Mac's I've got to admit the Filesystem is to delicate. OK, now you've got me curious, did you pull the wrong board, or forget the power was on? I've heard of people hot-swapping Unibus and Q-Bus boards, but there is no way I'm that gutsy! Shoot, pulling hotswapable drives makes me nervous! Zane

Tony Duell skrev: A friend of mine introduced a soldering iron into his Amiga 2000 when he suddenly noticed that it was still plugged in and running. =) -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6a. Fernsehen ist das einzige Schlafmittel, das mit den Augen genommen wird. --- Vittorio de Sica

Got to agree there. When shipping boards, I first bag them in anti-static, and then wrap them in bubble-wrap. Then come the peanuts or more bubblewrap. One of the scarriest packages I've ever recieved was some PDP-11 Q-Bus boards a few years ago. They were wrapped in Tin Foil!!! I mentioned this on the list at the time, and IIRC, the consensous was this was safe. However, it's not something I'll ever do. Out of curiousity, how safe is dry newspaper? Zane

It was explained to me at the time, however, it just strikes me as inherently wrong! My mind my realize it's OK, but emotionally I don't. I kind of thought that might be the case. Though the only thing I think I have like that is a MicroVAX II Board set, and it's not single sheets, they're each dropped into the fold of a section of the paper. At the time I didn't have any bags, and they've sat in a box like that for several years untouched. They donated a BA123 chassis to my PDP-11/73. I'm assuming that the common practice we've all seen of just dumping the boards loose in a cardboard box is not a good idea. Zane

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The bare circuit boards covered in peanuts are the ones that bother me most since the peanuts are such a good source of static. Each time I've ever received a board packed like that I've always politely informed the shipper of the problem and why they shouldn't do so. I also dislike it when a system unit is shipped uncovered in peanuts and they get wedged into the connecotrs, drives or actually inside the case. At the very least, anything I ship is well wrapped in bubblewrap prior to placing it in the box of peanuts. On the flip side is the one person that actually shipped some RAM in the IBM black hard plastic anti-static case for RAM. Jeff -- Collector of Classic Microcomputers and Video Game Systems: Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757

On 27 Apr 2001, Iggy Drougge wrote: Wow, so you'll go through all the bother of individual shutting down any servers on the system instead of just typing a `shutdown' command which would do that for you automatically using the init scripts? Ohhh-kaaay... That seems like an awful lot of work on your part, going out of your way to PUNISH THE STUPID FILESYSTEMS FOR NOT BEING SMARTER!!! I take it you've never worked in a critical production environment, have you? When your job is at stake (and therefore your financial well-being), you don't try to prove a point by not shutting down systems properly... Even when they are designed to handle such failures. Now when you're evaluating systems for purchase. Hell yeah. Beat them to death. -brian.

Quoting Iggy Drougge &lt;optimus(a)canit.se&gt;se>: ...and writing log files, or writing files that the client tells them to. -- Jeffrey S. Sharp jss(a)ou.edu

Quoting Iggy Drougge &lt;optimus(a)canit.se&gt;se>: Well, you see, there is/are some program(s), called the "operating system", that you aren't turning off. You turn it off by running the shutdown procedure. -- Jeffrey S. Sharp jss(a)ou.edu

Quoting Iggy Drougge &lt;optimus(a)canit.se&gt;se>: Actually, the OS is the only thing that ever writes to your disks. Other programs can merely request that it be done. -- Jeffrey S. Sharp jss(a)ou.edu

On Fri, 27 Apr 2001, Bill Pechter wrote: That depends on the model and what the disks reside in. Even when using Sun shoeboxes, with the drive mounted inside where one doesn't see it, one can see the light blinking through the holes in the case; of course, a 5-1/4" disk can also be mounted in a Sun shoebox so that the disk drive's front cover, and light, are clearly visible from the front of the shoebox. Then, there are the third-party shoeboxes where one can see one or more disk drive front covers and lights... :-) Of course, even though I can see some the disk drive lights, I still do proper shutdowns whenever possible. -- Copyright (C) 2001 R. D. Davis The difference between humans & other animals: All Rights Reserved an unnatural belief that we're above Nature & rdd(a)perqlogic.com 410-744-4900 her other creatures, using dogma to justify such http://www.perqlogic.com/rdd beliefs and to justify much human cruelty.

Some people don't understand any multitasking OS's. This will go on until he loses major data or trashes some disk structure. Even AIX's jfs will lose eventually in this situation. Sometimes (machine lock up ) you HAVE to do this. Otherwise it's a big nono. Yup... What he said. Or at least don't expect me to recommend you. bill (Who's currently looking for Unix and NT Network Admin staff in Monmouth County, New Jersey -- mail to pechter(a)ureach.com) -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT d? s+:+ a+ C+++ UB++++ P+ L+ E--- W++ N++ o K++ w--- O++ M+ V++ PS+ PE Y+ PGP t 5 X R- tv++ b+ DI++ D- G e++ h---- r+++ y++++ ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------ -- "Bill Gates is a Persian cat and a monocle away from being a villain in a James Bond movie" - Dennis Miller || bpechter(a)shell.monmouth.com

My AIX 3.2.5 boxes at the last job lost their rootvg or at least the boot area once and since they were decommissioned and non-y2k compliant I never did fix them. -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT d? s+:+ a+ C+++ UB++++ P+ L+ E--- W++ N++ o K++ w--- O++ M+ V++ PS+ PE Y+ PGP t 5 X R- tv++ b+ DI++ D- G e++ h---- r+++ y++++ ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------ -- "Bill Gates is a Persian cat and a monocle away from being a villain in a James Bond movie" - Dennis Miller || bpechter(a)shell.monmouth.com

Bill Pechter skrev: I've been multitasking since day one, I just don't think that means I have to multitask on a DECwriter connected to a PDP, as the BSDs seem to think. Possibly. Then it's probably bye bye BSD. It doesn't matter, since it will happen sooner or later. Last year, when I returned from summer holidays, the power was gone. The NetBSD system spun up fine, while I never could make the Linux system go multiuser again. No wonder I don't run Linux on anything any more. Something tells me I shouldn't put this on my resum?. =) -- En ligne avec Thor 2.6a. G? med i SUGA, Swedish Usergroup of Amiga! WWW: http://swedish.usergroup.amiga.tm/ BBS: 08-6582572, telnet://sua.ath.cx:42512

Define older hardware. On my Sparc 10 and 20 I run Solaris 2.6 as it's the last version to support some of the hardware I use. Though I've been threatening to move the Sparc 20 to Solaris 8 when I upgrade its harddrives. I'll put it another way, if you have the chance to shut a UNIX box down properly and don't, you're a fool. Especially if the system is like my one Linux box and has a lot of disk space hanging off of it (about 70GB), as that's some serious fsck time! Personally if a system has an option to shut it down gracefully, that's what I do, no matter the OS. Zane

What can I say, the oldest Sun hardware I've been able to get my hands on is a Sparc 2. Though in all honestly I'm not really interested in running UNIX on anything older, except getting it running on one of my PDP-11's (though that's a very low priority). Make me sick, what kind of Ultra? I've really been wanting one, but haven't found one with the right bang for the buck. Though I could almost justify the new Sunblade 100! I'm afriad not, I've only used Solaris 7 on a x86 box, and haven't tried Solaris 8 at all. Even at work we're still running Solaris 2.6. Actually you misunderstood me there (and I wasn't clear enough). It's not the drives, it's the S-Bus boards. I've got Sun 100Mbit and PTI 430 SCSI cards that aren't supported beyond Solaris 2.6. However, the only board in the Sparc 20 that isn't is the PTI 430, and I recently got a couple Sun SCSI boards I can replace it with. So when I pull out the 2 2GB 7200 Drives with 2 9GB 7200 drives I'll see how it runs with Solaris 8. Try anywhere from 400GB - 1.2TB of diskspace after a power outage, and that's per server! Well, I've been running it since January '92, however, I don't really trust it for more than a Workstation. I ran Red Hat for a few years, but switched to Mandrake a few months ago. I've never had real problems with the filesystem stability, however, that might also have something to do with the way that I use it. I rarely keep my Linux boxes up for more than a few days at a time, normally no more than a few hours in fact. Though my current Linux workstation at home has the disturbing habit of crashing after being up for 2-3 days. Hmmm, actually come to think of it, I've got a Linux Workstation at work now (finally had to give up the antique RS6000), and it's been up for nearly two months now. It's also running a modified RedHat 6.2 release. BTW, I've never had Netscrape cause a UNIX system to crash. Though it's caused my Mac to crash plenty of times. Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | healyzh(a)holonet.net (alternate) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

You know, as I thought about it just switching off the power on the newer unix boxes probably IS less destructive since the power button on newer units is not actually tied directly in to the power supply. I am thinking of newer RS6k's and HP9000 machines I have seen where the power switch merely makes init do a powerfail shutdown (which is more graceful than yanking the power cord or hitting the power on machine where the button is actually connected to the PS) We had our computer room UPS blow a capacitor and a non-electrician facility person responding to the fire alarm cut the power to the room (rather than let the make before break switch merely cutoff power to the UPS) and our 400 user RS6k with an ISAM database needed two days of database rebuilding before it was functional. The modern JFS filesystems came back nice and quick but that did not stop the user data from being corrupted. Its replacement we are gradually cutting over to which uses a modern transaction log based database was back up when the power was restored. Likewise, on VMS without RMS journaling package installed you are likely to get RMS-?-BUG, RMS-?-IRC, etc errors on machines with busy indexed files switched off without a graceful shutdown. On Fri, 27 Apr 2001, R. D. Davis wrote: --