At 10:33 PM 1/24/02, wysoft@extremecode.org wrote:
1. I found a pinout for the printer/serial port on the mailing lists. I can
>always make my own cable, but it would be nice to just save some time and buy
>one. Are these available in DEC serial <-> DB25 male? All I want is to be able
>to plug it into my SS5 and use minicom with it.

You have three choices, you can find one of the DB25 to MMJ adapter "hoods" 
and just use a bit of cable between it and the VLC, or you can build a MMJ 
to RJ45 cable and then use an off the shelf DB25/RJ45 hood, or you can 
scrounge an old six conductor phone cable and an old PC serial cable, then 
cut them so that you've got one cable that ends in the RJ-12 and one that 
ends in the proper DB25 and then strip the individual wires in the cables, 
twist then solder them together, then wrap each splice in electrical tape 
and then all of the conductors as a group in duct tape.
Break off the tab on the RJ-12 (may have already happened if someone threw 
out the cable!) and shove it into the VLC and put a bit of tape to hold it in.

Option three leaves you with the world's ugliest console cable but it can 
often be built from materials you can find for free :-)

>2. Does anyone have a diagram for the status LEDs at the rear of this machine?

Parts of the VLC manual are on line somewhere. However, when you plug in a 
console if the minimum is working (some memory and the serial port) you 
will get much better info from that than you will from the LEDs.

>3. Any success netbooting/installing on this machine? I see that a LANCE chip
>is required to netboot, and this machine has one, so...

It works great, set up a DHCP server to talk to it once MOP has loaded the 
booter into it and off you go.

>4. Can it run OpenVMS 6.0? I have some VAX VMS CD media that I kindly "saved"
>from a Navy dumpster, so I'll fiddle with that too if I can. Hopefully this
>machine knows how to boot from an SCSI CD.

I'm pretty sure it will run 6.0, I know it will run 6.1. I believe support 
for the VLC was added in 5.5-2H4 but wouldn't count on it.

>I actually have no idea whether or not this thing works, but it appears to 
>have
>16 or 24MB of RAM and a 240MB SCSI drive, so it could probably prove itself to
>be useful :)

The RAMs are standard 1M x 36 true parity SIMMs (4MB/stick). They must be 
installed in pairs so standard configs are 8, 16 and 24 MBytes. There was 
apparently plans to support 2M x 36 SIMMs (the CPU can handle it) but I've 
never seen console firmware that can configure the memory controller for 
the extra RAM. My guess is that they didn't want to support mixed memory 
configs, and they didn't want to eat into the 3100 business.


--Chuck