Meanwhile, back at the ranch....
The IBM RT I was given last weekend turned out to be configured with:
Enhanced Advanced 032 processor, which is hardwired with 16MB of
RAM. No Advanced Floating-Point Accelerator, drat it all.
Extended Monochrome Display adapter (1024x768) w/6155 mono display
Ungerman-Bass Baseband [ethernet] adapter
Streaming Tape Drive Adapter - RT interface for 6157 1/4 tape drive
No tape drive or cable
1 5.25" DSHD floppy drive
3 E70 70MB ESDI hard disks - 2 dead as dirt.
1 SIIG 8-bit Serial/Parallel adapter, c.1998, which prevents booting
Keyboard
I was able to find archived images of AIX v2.2.1 (which, interestingly
enough, I may be able to use *legally*. IBM permits their AIX
instructors to run AIX on personal machines for private/non-commercial
machines. I'm NOT gonna call Mr. Wolden and ask....) The archive
includes VRM, BOS and Extended Utilities, all IBM's updates & patches,
the NFS add-ons, man pages (IBM *still* provides the man pages as a
separate product!), TCP/IP, and some GNU stuff. And the all-important
Diags disk set.
NOTE: If you ever have to work on an IBM workstation, as soon as
you get the case open, get a paper clip, solder pick, fountain pen, or
other not-very-sharp object, and gouge a couple of knuckles with it.
Bleeding directly onto the machine is not necessary, but every IBM I've
ever worked on required the ritual blood sacrifice before booting.
The machine booted to the Diags just fine, after I pulled the serial
adapter. There I discovered that the keyboard has several dead keys
(well, two, but the Escape key counts triple), that the RT wants
<Ctrl>+<Alt>+<Pause> to reboot, and that the display must be powered up
before the computer. Everything but the 2 dead E70 drives and the
keyboard checked out.
There are numerous refernces to the use of IDE drives in the RT
newsgroup. Although AIX actually will install in 70MB, it leaves little
room to play in. Plus, that one E70 alone was warming my house and
whining loudly enough to make my cats cry.
Final verdict: they're right, but I saw some glitches I haven't seen
documented.
You need a "dumb" ISA IDE/floppy controller. It must be set to
secondary IDE and primary floppy. Any serial/parallel/game ports will
probably have to be disabled. The RT will boot from a secondary IDE
controller, if you satisfy the drive specs. On mine, even aftetr
removing the ESDI controller, setting the IDE card to primary causes the
machine to freeze on boot.
Drive specs: A Seagate Medalist IDE drive. Period. Some posts suggest
that small Quantum or Conner drives will work, but not boot. The WD,
Quantum, and Maxtor drives I tried weren't detected at all. The Conner
340MB was detected and passed, but I haven't tried booting it. The
Seagate ST3250A Medalist is booting quite nicely as hd(1,0). I did try
an ST32122A 2G, and it installed OK and booted fine once. After that,
it drops into maintenance mode on boot, with unrecoverable errors.
Mount claims that the filesystem devices don't exist. I'm not convinced
that wasn't due to operator error during install.
Still to do:
Find vi. I haven't installed the Extended set yet. Please Gods don't
make me use ed.
Set up TCP/IP networking. Just got the TCP/IP set installed last
night, and configuration is waiting on vi. I hope.
I've been offered a copy of 4.4BSD/Romp for it, which I may try out.
I'd like to try AOS, but I can't find the full distribution, just the
tools, updates, and diagnostic utilities.
Find a mouse.
Suck it up, gird my loins, and try repairing the keyboard. I may try
using stty to remap the dead keys till I have a backup kbd.
Yee-Haw. I now have AIX v2.2.1, toys, tools & updates, on 5.25
floppy!
Doc
Received on Fri Jan 25 2002 - 15:54:17 GMT