VSII/GPX joy (and minor annoyance)

[Arno Kletzander]

Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> > On Sunday 30 September 2007 06:03, Arno Kletzander wrote:
> > my very first DEC computer has arrived (...)
> Congrats.

Thanks. I'd already had my hands on a MicroVAX II and a MicroVAX 3100,
but those weren't my own. I basically just dusted them off, tried to
boot them up once, wrote a catalog page and placed them in storage
at the University's computer collection, so there wasn't much reason to get more involved with them. The MVII wouldn't boot due to a broken power supply and Tony currently talks me through finding the fault there :)

> As others will tell you, dead RD53s are a common occurrence.

And sometimes quite possible to repair in a makeshift clean box because
the problem in most cases is just the sticky rubber bumper inside, as
I've been reading.

> You can always pull out the VCB cardset... (...)
> I think that you may need to pull the VCB to get it to use the serial 
> port as the console.

The ribbon cable interconnects between the VCB boards look a little frail
and the connectors are so difficult to get at that I think I was already
pushing my luck when I changed the board order. I also would like to keep
all the boards in the machine and just have to plug in the user interface
components when I get some.

As I've said, I can get into the console by causing a Break condition and
I don't _need to_ see the identification and countdown stuff. It was just
a minor rant on what I would see as a desirable feature of the PROM code.

> Other than that, I'm off now looking for a MOP server and some 
> netbootable OS image, perhaps NetBSD, for a start...

I have since finished downloading NetBSD/vax 3.1. In order to make 'er
boot that, I still need a MOP daemon that will run without me jumping
through flaming hoops, i.e. under Win9x. I have found some old messages
from Fred N. van Kempen about a creation of his called OpenMOP, which 
should meet these requirements, but his homepage www.pdp11.nl is down
and, come to think of it, I don't remember seeing him on the list 
recently.

Anybody know where the program can still be obtained? Search machines
are coming up mostly blank. And more importantly, is Fred okay?


-- 
Arno Kletzander

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