Re: Installing NetBSD on a MicroVax 3900

[Dave McGuire <mcguire%neurotica.com@localhost>]

On Jun 8, 2008, at 7:47 AM, Mr Ian Primus wrote:
> Well, I got it to work. I was still struggleing with getting the  
> Vax to mount the NFS share, and I had turned on the monitor for my  
> Linux PC, and was trying to mount the NFS share there to test. That  
> must have been just enough extra load on the circuit, because about  
> a minute later, I was sitting in the dark listening to the whine of  
> disks spinning down. After I reset the breaker, and powered things  
> back up - it worked! Maybe re-running exportfs -ra wasn't enough  
> and it needed to restart the daemon, or something, but after that,  
> it worked.
>
> The Vax netbooted from the Sun, got an IP address, mounted the NFS  
> share, loaded the kernel, and started the installer. The menus were  
> all garbled and unreadable - because I was using a TeleVideo  
> terminal, but it worked. I swapped the terminal for a VT100 and  
> installed NetBSD 4.0 on an RA90. I can now boot NetBSD directly  
> from disk, and it seems to work.

  Most excellent, congrats!  I had dusted off a VLC to try to  
duplicate your configuration, but you beat me to it by getting it  
working. ;)

  The same thing (power-wise) happened to me last week.  I was  
working on the PDP-11/70 and I decided to see if the circuit would  
support the TE16 in addition to the CPU and memory box...I should've  
known better.

         -Dave

--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL