Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!wesommer From: wesommer@athena.mit.edu (William Sommerfeld) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: Qs about MicroVAX UNIX availability Message-ID: <1965@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> Date: Sat, 5-Dec-87 05:44:40 EST Article-I.D.: bloom-be.1965 Posted: Sat Dec 5 05:44:40 1987 Date-Received: Thu, 10-Dec-87 04:38:00 EST References: <3076@megaron.arizona.edu> <9611@mimsy.UUCP> Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Reply-To: wesommer@athena.mit.edu (William Sommerfeld) Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lines: 38 In article <9611@mimsy.UUCP> chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes: >Correct. I believe someone at MIT has the necessary changes to either >4.3 or Mt Xinu to make it run on a Vaxstation 2000. Yes; we run it on a large (~100) number of VS2000's around here. We derived the device drivers from Ultrix 2.0; it was derived from the UW port of 4.3+NFS, which incidentally does come with support for the MicroVAX II. Win Treese should be able to give you authoritative information on this, but here goes what I believe to be truth: For those of you with "early" test sources to Ultrix 2.0 who are trying to recreate this: be warned that the bad-block replacement code in the disk driver for the VS2000's is just plain broken; this has reportedly been fixed in the latest version. >Right. There are some fancy boot floppies (using the VMS boot >loader and a `compress'ed vmunix!) that let you boot via Ethernet >from a server. Personally, I have never minded tape boots, but >then I have never had to use TK50s either :-) . In the version I've seen, you don't need floppies; you just type 'B XQA0' on the console and it sends out a "help me, I'm a loser" packet over the ethernet using the MOP protocol; assuming the server is listening, and knows about you, it rams a kernel back at you. The Ultrix 2.x load image contains a ramdisk miniroot filesystem containing everything you need, so you can come up and nfs-mount the rest of the world, and run diskless. Tim Shepard (.. he'll probably kill me for mentioning his name) of MIT's Lab for Computer Science successfully reverse-engineered MOP, and has a "network install" of 4.3 for the VAXstation II; this basically uses the same techniques as the miniroot install, except that it uses MOP rather than a tape drive. - Bill Sommerfeld wesommer@athena.mit.edu