Bruse Lane queried: <The VS2000 is the little square 'cube,' is it not? If so, I have a pair. <was planning on using one for a disk formatter. Yep the 1cuft vax., Has MFM disk interface for hds and 5.25" 1.2meg floppies and on the mainboard there is a 50 pin connector for SCSI. Plug a cable with 50pin berg into it and bring it out the bottom. The only SCSI device it will boot is TZK50 (TK50 with SCSI adaptor). However if you can get ultrix or VMS on a disk it both can use the SCSI to access otehr devices other tha boot. Also the printer port(9pin) if you pull pin 9to ground and boot it becomes the console for a terminal. FYI the disks that work with the vs2000 are st225/20meg HH, st251/40meg, RD52(quantum q540 31mb), RD53(micropolus 1325/71meg) and RD54(maxtor2190/150meg). Other drives with the same geometry can be used if you want to use it with media the rom knows. <??? How so? I've not worked enough with the stuff to guess at that one. Boot the OS, build a single user system on disk and use that to build a bootable tape. <A! That's IT!! Yes, I can do this! I can build Ultrix onto one of my <3100/M38's then, and use it for netbooting the VAXStation! Yes you can as most of the vaxen will mop boot if the NI is there. <Allison, if you were within range, you'd get a big hug! I even have an <honest-to-DEC RRD42 SCSI CD drive just waiting to be used. <If you could outline the steps for me, so I can have a printout to refer <to, I'd appreciate it. Thanks again! Wish I could. I know the outline only and that the capability is there. <BTW, can I also do the remote boot with OpenVMS? I picked up a Ver. 6.2 <distribution kit while I was in the Bay Area. Yes, and depending on the license you have with it(must have) you can also cluster them using NI. The cluster host can be any vaxen, the higest performing one you have is the logical choice. The alternate is booting as a diskless workstation or remote boot(localdisk for swapfiles). Vs2000s were commonly used as workstations with local swapdisks (rd52s or rd31s) or as decwindows terminals. FYI: vms without the license pak for it is marginally useful. Brief explanation of MOP boot. This is a DEC protocal that goes back to PDP-11s(they used serial lines for this!) and it was Maintenance Operations Protocal. It allowed one system to push code into another. It's protocal is fairly simple, the boot requestor puts a message on the NI that says BOOT ME and it's Eithernet hardware ID. The host is tasked with recognizing the address and feeding back the correct file usually a boot loader. The boot loader is more sophisticated and will then respond back saying ok lets use a better protocal and it then loads the one of three things, another bigger loader, VMSboot or untrixboot. After that point the protocal is usually either IP or DECnet though user selected protocals are possible. The actual application loaded is up the the designer/user and examples I've worked with were DIAGS, PrintServer (lps40/20/32), DECwindows, VMSworkstation remote boot and VMS cluster. Doing this on unix systems means you must have a operating host with networking running. The boot process from the requestor is the same but the host must have a daemon to handle the booting process. USually there are config files to manage this. Allison