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