VAX Ethernet (was Re: IDE on Qbus (was Re: Microvax II)) - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

18 Oct 2000

From: Ethan Dicks &lt;ethan_dicks(a)yahoo.com&gt;

...
 Well my recent (last night) experience suggests that
what you remember is
...
 true.  I was refitting my BA123 with a CPU, 8Mb of PMI
memory, my one-and-
...
 only DEQNA and an RQDX3 and stuffed into it a bootable
RD54 from a VS2000
...
 that happens to have VMS 5.5 and some stuff to fire up
a LAT server and
clustering.  The startup bitched mightily about the presence of the DEQNA
...
 and casual reading of the error messages seemed to tell
me that VMS 5.5
cluster manager did *not* like it one bit. 

the DEQNA went unsupported because of clustering.  Part of the problem
was
packet errors that required a driver that encapsulated data to insure the
errors would be caught.  That was a huge perfomance hit on eithernet
which
by disk standards then was slower, and didn't need further slowing.  That
added to the DEQNA being an really old PDP-11 design that outlived
a lot of revs (L5 is the last I know of) meant a newer and less cranky
design was wanting.

I'd not use it in a cluster unless I had to but V5.5 was when clusters
started to protest (they can be forced).

...
 Because the machine is standalone at the moment, I
didn't pay much attention
...
 to it all.  Eventually, I do need to get something
working with Qbus and
Ethernet (so I can begin to make physical backups of some 9 track tapes I
...
 have sitting here).  I'll have to either stuff a
KDA50 in this beast and
use my MDA SDI<->ESDI box (dual 1.2Mb disks) or hang a couple of RD53s
off the RQDX3 and limit myself to one or two tapes at a time before shooting
...
 them down the pipe. 

Don't cluster them, make it peer to peer and it should go fine.

...
 Ah the good old days... 

Look at the bright side... unlike winders we know what the solution is,
winders may also have that knowledge in 10 years.

   As if we'd care by then. ;)

Allison