Brian Chase wrote:
> > > as I have never dealt with VMS system administration. So, I tried
> > > ULTRIX again, which still didn't come up. It simply halts without
> > > any error message.
> >
> > VMS is a reasonably good diagnostic :-)
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > Then at least you know you are trying to load Ultrix onto good
> > hardware. I've only used Ultrix as a user, I've never installed it.
> > But I assume that you could (in some way) copy the distribution
> > tapes to a spare disk and then install from there. VMS may be one
> > way of doing that.
> 
> For what it's worth.  In college, my roommate and I netinstalled Ultrix
> 4.2 onto a VAXstation 2000.  We used a VAX/VMS system and MOP to serve
> the distribution.  I don't remember the details, but it's at least
> possible.  So, maybe you can get VMS loaded on something like a cheap
> MicroVAX 3100 and netinstall the VAX 6000 from there?

Hehe, I don't have any "cheap" VAXen. But I should 
be able to netboot from my FreeBSD laptop with mopd as 
well. 

Next week I will have the Ultrix boot tape as files on 
my laptop. Assuming that Ultrix netbooting is similar to 
any other UNIX netbooting, the next stage after mopd/tftp 
would mount NFS as the root filesystem to load the kernel 
from. I can set up an Ultrix filesystem on FreeBSD 
accessible via NFS easily. In fact, I would have no clue 
how to do that on VMS.

The only use I have for VMS at this point is (a) try
out various things to see if the hardware and disks etc.
are O.K., (b) copy the Ultrix TK onto 9-track file
by file, with many retries allowed, and (c) compile
Ultrix....

Geoff made it sound like one could compile Ultrix on VMS.
That would allow me to put some printf calls at the various
places before halt calls to help me debug the situation.
So, if you know anything about cross-compiling Ultrix, either
on VMS or somewhere else, I'd appreciate.

I could make myself a cross-compilation suite out of GCC.
But GCC has some constraints with byte order of the host
machine to be same as on target machine. I also don't know
about the linker. GNU binutils might do the trick. But
it's a lot of unknowns that could potentially confound my
situation even more.

... actually now I come to think of it, I can compile the 
Ultrix code from sources next week as well. ... it's a long
story, but if I still walk in darkness, I'll bake myself
ultrixboot and ultrixload with debug output. Then the only
question is how I use my version of VMS to move the files
from my laptop onto the VAX for writing the boot tape...
Is UCX part of a standard VMS distribution? What about
[xyz]modem or kermit? A MOP client doing tftp like things?

thanks,
-Gunther

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