At 7:20 AM +0000 12/18/12, Ian King wrote: And please let me be the first to express my condolences to your wife! :-) It is cool though! :-) Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | | Photographer | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | My flickr Photostream | | http://www.flickr.com/photos/33848088 at N03/ | | My Photography Website | | http://www.zanesphotography.com |

On Dec 17, 2012, at 11:20 PM, Ian King wrote: Always thought they were cool. Had an incomplete 3650 a few years ago that I gave away (didn't have time/space or information on where to get parts?do now). First thing to do (well after it gets moved out of the living room) is to get it configured and up on my home network. I want to net boot it (just in case the disks fail) and save everything onto my server. I also found out that it has pretty much all of the SW that Symbolics produced for it (just have to figure out where it all is). TTFN - Guy

On Dec 18, 2012, at 11:27 AM, Josh Dersch wrote: I'm not sure. Right now, I'm trying to familiarize myself with it. That could be true. My biggest thing right now is to get the "site" configuration done and get this on my home network. Anyone have a simple "cookbook" set of instructions to get started with? Right now I'm trying to figure out how to dig out the ethernet MAC address so I can add it to my DHCP configuration. Yes, it's seriously cool. TTFN - Guy

On 12/18/2012 12:25 PM, Guy Sotomayor wrote: I can point you in the right direction. This is all from memory (it's been awhile since I've done this) so this may not be 100% accurate but it should get you started. I'm not sure how to get the MAC address (I've always just looked at my router's recently-used MAC list and worked it out from there) but I'm sure someone else here can help out... One thing to keep in mind is that the Document Examiner (Select-D) is your best friend. All the documentation is available there and it's pretty easy to search (use the "Select Candidates" command). 1) Make sure you have the IP/TCP System loaded into your Genera World if it hasn't already been. The documentation is available in the Document Examiner, you might also read through http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/symbolics/software/genera_8/Symbolic…. I'm making the assumption that the actual software is already present on the disk (if not it may be a bit more difficult). Loading the IP/TCP system can be accomplished from a Lisp Listener with the command "Load System Ip-tcp" and after this you can invoke (tcp:initialize-internet-namespace) to set up the basic INTERNET namespace in your Site's namespace. At this point you will want to save the world (who doesn't?) using the "Save World" command. Alternately, you might want to load the NFS client and server Systems before doing this, just to get those taken care of as well. "Save World" takes the running Lisp image (including the systems you've just loaded) and writes it out to a World file on your FEP partition. This can be done Incrementally (in which case the new World file is sort of a diff of the current World) or you can save the entire world in a new file; the latter takes a lot more disk space. "Save World" will prompt you whether to update the FEP boot files automatically -- do so. At this point log out, halt the machine, and reboot. 2) Add Namespace objects for IP/TCP hosts on your network. This is also covered in the aforementioned documentation, but in a nutshell, use the command "Create Namespace Object <Host /hostname>/." This will invoke the Namespace Editor which you can use to define attributes of the other machines on your network (address, protocols they support, OS type, etc.) You'll probably want to define the machine-type as "UNIX42" for anything that's not another symbolics machine (unless you happen to have some TOPS-20 machines on your network :)). You can describe what services the machine supports (FTP, NFS, Telnet, etc). NFS configuration is a whole different can of worms and can (in my experience) be a bit annoying, mostly around authentication. I usually give up and allow anonymous access from my Symbolics machines :). When you're done with a new Host entry, be sure to save it by clicking on the "Save Object" command. The really cool thing about Genera's namespace system is that once you have your hosts properly defined, file transfers (and other connectivity) are done transparently from the user's perspective. That is, if you had a host that exposed only FTP, and another host that exposed only NFS, the command to copy a file from both of those hosts is identical (Copy File UNIXHOST:/foo/bar/baz/thing.tar ...) and Genera works out the transport to use underneath the covers. That should be enough to get your machine on the network and talking to other machines. - Josh

On 12/18/2012 1:22 PM, Guy Sotomayor wrote: I'm sure there is, I just have no idea what it is. I believe the command is "Show Systems" but I may be mistaken and I don't have a machine nearby to verify (it'll definitely start with "Show" -- just type "Show" and hit "Complete" to show all the possibilities, choose the one that looks like what you want ;) ). "Show Loaded Systems" will show what's currently loaded (as will the herald that displays in the Lisp Listener at startup). Ah, in that case, read up on the "Define Site" command. - Josh

On 12/18/2012 2:09 PM, Jim Stephens wrote: The good thing here is that, assuming you don't overwrite the original World distribution files via "Save World" (probably not a good idea) you can get back to a clean state fairly easily, you just need to clean up some of the namespace files in the LMFS. The bad news is, for the 3600 series there really isn't a way for an end-user to do a complete restore of a system (i.e. if the system disk fails and needs to be replaced) since Symbolics never released the tools to do that to the general public. If you need your disk replaced, you talk to David Schmidt. For the XL series this is a bit easier (still difficult). The MacIvory systems are by far the easiest to deal with in this regard. - Josh

On 12/18/2012 2:25 PM, Mouse wrote: The major hurdle here is that it uses ESDI disks, formatted with an odd sector size (IIRC, it's 1280 bytes/sector). This doesn't mean it's impossible, but all the OSes I've tried seem to have trouble dealing with sector sizes other than 512 bytes. (The other hurdle is dealing with the bad sector map when writing a previously captured image to a new disk...) - Josh