Tony,

*Almost* all the info you are after can be found on:

http://vaxarchive.sevensages.org/hw/vs3100/index.html

I'm not sure the tape install image is currently working.
The last time I tried it, Chuck McManis (I think) tried
it at the same time, and neither of us could get it to work.

The preferred way to install at this time is netboot, with 
serial console.  Brian Chase's NetBOOT FAQ is an excellent place
to start.  Watch out for using RedHat Linux 6.x as a server,
NFS is broken.  

There is a recent CD image floating around too, if you have 
a CD reader that supports 512K blocksize.  I haven't tried 
the most recent one yet, but there are a few mails from the
last few weeks that describe how people have got this to 
work.  (Matt -- is there one now that is presumed to work
"out of the box"?) 

The MMJ connector is 6 pin, offset.  DEC used to make 
a cable called "DecConnect" that would let you connect
one of these Vaxtstations directly to a VT-420 terminal.
They also make a block with number H8571-F that would 
connect the DecConnect cable to a 25-pin serial connector
(it only has pins 2,3,6,7 & 20 though).  If you inherited
this computer, the previous owners might have such 
cables and blocks lying around.

Doug 


On Sat, 29 Jul 2000, Tony Magni wrote:

> I am trying to install via tape TK50 (show device under ultrix column says
> TK13) on a 3100 76 with color, hence I have a few questions:
> 	I know that I cannot install nor run any kernel with the color
> card ( that's what I understood, at least). If I remove the card, the
> machine starts up fine, but the screen (which is a digital original that
> came with machine) will not show anything. So I would have to do the
> install from serial console. But: do I have to remove the color card to
> install over serial, or can I leave it in?
> 	where can I find pinouts for a terminal serial cable? settings
> have to be 9600bps and what else? ( I saw this stuff in a posting already,
> but I just subscribed, and grepping through them now would be crazy)
> 	To create the bootable tape, I connected the drive to my linux
> box, and dd'd the gunzipped boot.fs from 1.4.2 onto the tape with bs=512.
> (This process took like 2hours for that 1MB file! Is this normal?)
> When I boot off the tape, I get the system message saying to press any key
> to abort autoboot with a _5 at the end of the line. Then, after a long
> wait (10-15min) it tries to boot various kernels (like boot netbsd.old,
> boot gennetbsd...) but they all fail with an error code that was 5 digits
> long (32something).
> 
> thanks for your help.
> 
> ----
> Tony Magni
> Department of Neurological Surgery
> University Hospitals of Cleveland
> (216)844-1306, afm@cwru.edu, 
> http://discordia.cwru.edu/tinton/  
> 
>  - "I know Cleveland: I spent a year there one night!"
>                               (Bill, San Francisco, 1994)
>