On Sat, Jul 21, 2001 at 09:09:37PM -0700, Chuck McManis wrote:
> 
> Yup, nice system. Fast too.

it'll look purty next to my /400 box and my two /300 boxes. :)

> The Q bus goes along the top of the BA440 and there are *no* Q/Q slots. 
> Thus cards that are dual width must go in the top and quad width cards have 
> to be careful if they are next to another quad width card.

ah ha!!  i knew there had to be some reason i was having trouble, i was treating
this as a "standard" QBus box, no WONDER i couldn't get it to see those dual
cards (i was doing serpentine QBus grant pathing)

> Thats because the CQD card is being a tape controller too. Which is cool 
> because it means that it is a "TM" model (both disk and tape emulation) and 

yeah, that is kinda nifty, especially since this is going to be my "main" box
to run NetBSD/vax on, and i wouldn't mind putting a 4mm on it or something.

> I don't care what isildur says, being able to talk to a SCSI tape is a darn 
> useful thing on a VAX. :-)

tapes are always nice local, although remote is always a possability (except
when you tape server loses it's OS disk then you're screwed *grumble grumble*)

> So you can talk to it of course! You can use the D/P/L stuff from the 
> monitor or you can just plug your terminal into that MMJ on the card, hit 
> return, and start configuring drives. Its really quite nice. That's one of 
> the reasons folks really appreciate them.

wow, that's cool.  can't wait to finish getting OpenVMS 7.2 on the /400 so i
can put this thing back in the /500 and start hangind disks off of it!!! :)

> First rejumper it so that it starts its TMSCP emulation at the second tape 
> device. That will keep the qbus happy otherwise the tqk70 and the cmd will 
> argue with each other :-)

nah, don't need the TK50 to install OpenVMS 7.3 from CD, so i just pulled the
TK50 controller and will put that back in after VMS is on this box at which
point the CMD controller goes back on the /500 as its primary SCSI controller.
(or only at this point i guess)

ok, so how about the KZQSA? is that a completely lost cause for NetBSD? should
i just get it over with and stick it in a VMS box?

and one last thing, i have an OpenVMS CD here.  it was a sorta quick hack job
to get it made in time for me to pick it up on my trip, so i don't even know
if it's good or not (the guy with the original did a dd bs=2048 of the cd and
entropy tried burning it to a CD with cdrdao, alas, he has no vax to test it
on at the moment) but here's is what happens:

>>>show dev
[snip DSSI disks]

UQSSP Disk Controller 0 (772150)

UQSSP Tape Controller 0 (774500)
-MUA2 (TU81)

the CMD card is the only thing in this box, i took the TK50 controller out, so
the CMD sees the CD-ROM drive as a tape device??  that's, uhm, well, i don't
even know what to say. :)

so i go ahead and:

>>> BOOT MUA2
(BOOT/R5:0 MUA2)

  2..
-MUA2

the CD-ROM "gets busy" for a while, and then stops being busy and the machine
hangs there.  now, is that:

a) a bad CD

or

b) the CMD doesn't like my Plextor UltraPLEX (jumped to 512 since it normally
is slung off my sparc20)

ideas?

-brian