DEC 7000 (AXP) startup

From: Gunther Schadow <gunther_at_aurora.regenstrief.org>
Date: Sat Mar 22 22:55:01 2003

Hi,

thanks to Sridhar's kind encouragement, I turned on my new DEC 7000.
I just used my special VAX6000 receptacle (that puts 220 V 2 phases
on a 3-phase receptacle in just the right way for the VAX6000 to
work.) I had to change the plug from a 30A to a 20A plug which was
straight forward (almost same shape and dimensions). Plugged it in
and turned it on and it would right work.

I come to like this machine. A bit bulky, very modern looking.
That blower fan is very impressive and it's humming very cool. Not
so squeeky as the VAX6000 and not so blarringly loud as the
11/780. As usual, I had a bit of wobbling to do on the XMI bus to
get all cards tested fine and that works now. This one has two
StorageWorks boxes in its rack and the KZMSA cards. I loaded it
with disks etc and attempted to boot from them.

Turns out that this machine once ran under OSF/1 as all the disk
had OSF/1 bootblocks on them. But unfortunately none of the disks
I had left were actually bootable (missing osf_boot or causing
some panic. So, my question is, where can I get a UNIX system
for this machine? Are there any copies of OSF (bootables) around?
How about DEC-UNIX? NetBSD/Alpha (or FreeBSD for that matter)
won't run until we have fixed lack of an XMI bus driver. Are
there any port-alpha people who are working on this XMI issue? (On
the port-vax side it depends mainly on Ragge and the very few folks
with VAX6000s to do that.)

I tried the KZMSA board out in the VAX6000 just to see if this
really doesn't work. Indeed the card was not detected right
(shows up with ?????? in the SHOW CONFIGURATION). Is there
really nothing one could do to get that to work on VAX6000? Would
it work in a VAX7000?

thanks,
-Gunther
Received on Sat Mar 22 2003 - 22:55:01 GMT