Posted on

20-Feb-2007

A new cluster member
Earlier, I downloaded Personal Alpha – not the full freeware version yet, but a two-month trial one – and installed it on Demeter, the company laptop. Of course, VMS was installed on the disk container, and all that I need to do some investigation.
It works fine – as was to be expected. Not very fast, indeed, but well workable.
As it runs on Demeter, the instance is named “Persephone” – in Greek mythology Demeter’s daughter.

Of course, it would be nice to have it connected to Diana – the main VMS machine – as a cluster member. It works fine over the wired network, though the NIC is not usable for Windows anymore and connecting a Windows process (like terminal emulator or FTP program) is not possible. But it works.
Since Personal Alpha will use the same network connections as Windows, I tried to boot it into the cluster via wireless.
Does that work?
Yeah, why not: VMS = VMS and what’s it running on doesn’t really matter! That’s why WAX, Alpha and Itanium work in one cluster. Though not

    officially

supported (meaning it hasn’t passed rigorous testing) but since clustering is as the bare bones of VMS, it is not a true suprise. The actual product (Virtual Alpha) has no problem with clustering either, nor has Charon-VAX; fopr the very same reason: VMS (VAX) = VMS (AXP) = VMS (IA64) = VMS (CharonVAX) = VMS (VirtualAXP) …. (When will this be extended to IA32???).
The size of operator log incresed – but that was to be expected, (re)booting the second machine several times – and complete, including TCPIP processes. That is is over 4 times in size than normal, has another cause, discussed elsewhere.
However, there is a problem in accessing the MSCP-serverd disks. They can be seen, but cannot be accessed, or mounted. But that happened to Dido as well (except for the shared SCSI disks) so that is a more generic issue.

Posted on

20-Feb-2007

A new cluster member
Earlier, I downloaded Personal Alpha – not the full freeware version yet, but a two-month trial one – and installed it on Demeter, the company laptop. Of course, VMS was installed on the disk container, and all that I need to do some investigation.
It works fine – as was to be expected. Not very fast, indeed, but well workable.
As it runs on Demeter, the instance is named “Persephone” – in Greek mythology Demeter’s daughter.

Of course, it would be nice to have it connected to Diana – the main VMS machine – as a cluster member. It works fine over the wired network, though the NIC is not usable for Windows anymore and connecting a Windows process (like terminal emulator or FTP program) is not possible. But it works.
Since Personal Alpha will use the same network connections as Windows, I tried to boot it into the cluster via wireless.
Does that work?
Yeah, why not: VMS = VMS and what’s it running on doesn’t really matter! That’s why WAX, Alpha and Itanium work in one cluster. Though not

    officially

supported (meaning it hasn’t passed rigorous testing) but since clustering is as the bare bones of VMS, it is not a true suprise. The actual product (Virtual Alpha) has no problem with clustering either, nor has Charon-VAX; fopr the very same reason: VMS (VAX) = VMS (AXP) = VMS (IA64) = VMS (CharonVAX) = VMS (VirtualAXP) …. (When will this be extended to IA32???).
The size of operator log incresed – but that was to be expected, (re)booting the second machine several times – and complete, including TCPIP processes. That is is over 4 times in size than normal, has another cause, discussed elsewhere.
However, there is a problem in accessing the MSCP-serverd disks. They can be seen, but cannot be accessed, or mounted. But that happened to Dido as well (except for the shared SCSI disks) so that is a more generic issue.

Posted on

One more day of (mail) bombing

On yesterday’s post, I mentioned some server trying to deliver something – blocked because the address cannot be translated to a domain – one verey wto minutes or so.
Well, it did continue until this – being the last post:

%%%%%%%%%%% OPCOM 19-FEB-2007 22:50:57.98 %%%%%%%%%%%
Message from user INTERnet on DIANA
INTERnet ACP SMTP Accept Request from Host: 84.246.98.2 Port: 4144

%%%%%%%%%%% OPCOM 19-FEB-2007 22:50:58.15 %%%%%%%%%%%
Message from user TCPIP$SMTP on DIANA
%TCPIP-W-SMTP_UNBKTRNSIP, client IP address 84.246.98.2 is not backtranslatable to a host name

Operator.log is over 4 times the usual size. I guess 4 times, since Persepone – the personal Alpha on Demeter – was added to the cluster yesterday – over Wireless – what Alpha could do that! – and that added some extra lines as well.