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This is good so far. Means the hardware is ok. Uh oh. I was kind of afraid of this. A microvax with no drives except a single 72 meg HD smacks of a Vaxcluster node. Basically it sounds like there's no OS loaded, IMHO, and that disk was used only for swap when the machine was a remote booting Vaxcluster node. I could be wrong and it could be that the disk is hosed or was wiped before the machine was retired, but I'm betting you're going to wind up loading an OS on this thing yourself. So what's a vaxcluster? (now called an OpenVMS cluster) In short, it's a way to tie several VMS machines together for higher availability and more computing power. The machines share (at least one) batch queue, print queues, an IP address, and they will load share DEC proprietary networking connections. VMSclustering also gives you a set of tools to manage all or part of the cluster as a single unit, greatly reducing the work of managing multiple machines doing the same job. The purpose of this is twofold. First, if one machine dies, the other will pick up the jobs on the batch queue and carry on, and all the user has to do is reconnect. All file systems are shared, so the user shouldn't even see the difference, except for the performance hit. Second, rather than having a whole machine sitting idle to provide the redundancy I described above, clustering lets you use the resources of the "backup" machine as well. Microvaxen fit into this picture a little differently. At the university I did vaxcluster management at, we had 7 of the little things, each dedicated to a building, but booting over ethernet from a common server which also owned all the disks, except the swap disk for each machine, which was its only local drive. (I reorganized this later, but that's how it stood when I got there) In this configuration, you don't get any redundancy, but you DO get the horsepower sharing and disk sharing. I think this is very likely similar to what your Microvax II used to do for its living. -- Jim Strickland jim(a)DIESPAMMERSCUMcalico.litterbox.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------- BeOS Powered! -----------------------------------------------------------------------