On Sun, 7 May 2000, Chuck McManis wrote

> Marc Schneiders wrote:
> > 
> > As in my situation it was the easiest way, I installed 'manually' the
> > latest snapshot (19991115 IIRC), after netbooting my 'new' VAX (dmesg
> > below) and using the kernel for ka660 up for download at
> > www.vaxpower.de/download/.
> 
> Actually there are much later snap shots, one from april of 2000. See 
> ftp://ftp.neurotica.com/pub/os/NetBSD/vax/1.4x-24APR00/
> 

Thanks, I will check them out!

> > Netbooting and installing works alright. I do not seem to be able to
> > get bootblocks written to the disk though. Well none that work.
> 
> What kind of disk controller are you using in this system? 

You tell me! I'm completely new to all this. Never saw one running
before this one I just got :-)) There is a SCSI controller in it, I
presume, since there is an Exabyte Tape on a separate controller,
which has "DILOG" on it. 

The disks are all three on a controller with no label (I haven't taken
it out though for shear awe). Is the information from dmesg I posted
not enough to tell? Disks are RA82. I read dmesg as:

ibus --> qbus (uba0) --> ??? (uda1 [uda0 connecting the two floppy
drives]) ---> mscpbus2 ---> ra82 (3 of them)

GENERIC says about uda: "UDA50/RQDX?" That is all this newbie has been
able to find.

> Since the on
> board DSSI controller isn't supported and you've got at least and RQDX3
> in there, what was the other controller, is it SCSI per chance? There is
> a weird interaction with SCSI in some of the intermediate snapshots that
> have this behaviour (the boot starts but never prints the Netbsd prompt)
> In the archives there is a message from someone that used an older copy
> of boot to fix it. There is a new xxboot in the latest snapshot so that
> might fix it as well.
> 

I will find these and try them as netbooting is not nice. Problem is:
it does work ... sometimes. Then I boot or reboot the vax and the
'whoami' failes. I haven't sorted that out yet. The server seems to
blame, because rebooting the server (i386, NetBSD 1.4L) and it works
again.

--
Marc Schneiders --- marc@venster.nl --- marc@vrijdom.com

FreeBSD propro.freebeastie.org 5.0-CURRENT