Johnny Billquist wrote:


>>I could never see any sign of special
>>activity, neither from the RA90 drive nor the UDA-50.
>>
> 
> It would flicker very briefly, but I suppose you should see some
> action. Anyhow, the A or B button should light up if things are working.
> I assume you have the cabling correct. You know. The total number of
> cables between the UDA-50 and the disk must be an odd number.


DANG! How could I make such stupid mistake! It's not like I had
overcome this problem before ... so, thanks for reminging me.
Now, I need some screwing off bulkheads (of which I don't have
enough) to fix that but until then ...


>>The UDA-50
>>shows the cycling pattern on the LEDs, not unlike the KDA-50 in
>>my VAX6000s.


> That's the normal idle pattern. Shows that the UDA-50 is working
> correctly.


The manual that I have mumbles something about the speed of the
cycle pattern to be significant an might signal an error. Also,
the question still is whether the cycling pattern says that the
UNIBUS is connected properly ... I guess it doesn't have to be
ever addressed by the CPU in order to be showing this pattern.
So, my address jumpers could still be wrong or the DW780 could still
be screwed up a bit, right?

My main concern is that I think I should expect the UDA-50 to
show a different blinking pattern when it is in fact addressed and
is trying to access disks on the SDI cables. The cables being
wrong of disconnected does not keep the KDA-50 from blinking
differently. Since my UDA-50 always keeps cycling, it still looks
as if I have a problem upstream.

I guess I will try network booting the machine next. I did that
with the uVAX II successfully, in the case of the 11/780 I will
just have to load the boot program through kermit over the console.
I guess the proper way would be to generate DEPOSIT commands for
the boot loader (that otherwise would have been sent through MOP)
and send them through Kermit, right? But darn, I don't have a
DEUNA or DELUA ethernet but some other thing that may not even be
supported ... actually, I may have a DEUNA hardware, but I don't
know whether that is working...

regards,
-Gunther

-- 
Gunther Schadow, M.D., Ph.D.                    gschadow@regenstrief.org
Medical Information Scientist      Regenstrief Institute for Health Care
Adjunct Assistant Professor        Indiana University School of Medicine
tel:1(317)630-7960                         http://aurora.regenstrief.org