New VMS 8.4 CD
A new edition of the 8.4 fieldtest has arrived: a backup saveset and a CD image. I burned the latter onto a rewritable disk. Nero (that I used) complained about a blocksize that didn;t match but I burned it just the same.
One thing I found on the first edition: The system, set up as an IP cluster member, fails to boot MINIMAL and waits to join the cluster. No answer – and so the system waits, and waits….
In examination, I found that what I setup in SYSBOOT, was not preserved; it might have been the setting of one SYSGEN parameter that was set to 0 where 1 is default ??? That was my second issue: I couldn’t change SYSGEN parameters in SYSBOOT….
These have been reported, and Engineering asked for a crashdump. So I made one, but since the system would not boot normally, I booted from CD and copied the dumpfile onto tape.
Next I tried to install 8.4 on a new installation of FreeAXP – but that failed drastically due to the problems on the CD…The PWS complained about bad blocksize as wel but simply did not copy the files. Three, in fact, and none seems vital (two .COM files and another).
In the mean time, Engineering could not reproduce my problem changing SYSGEN parameters during boot. That was the first thing to re-test, and I couldn’t reproduce it either. It might have been an issue that is now solved.
Now I have a system running again, the files could be retrieved from tape and uploaded to HP.
I’ve set up a new network for testing: the PWS I use has two NICs, now one connected to the ‘normal’ LAN, the other with the test network, so whatever comes along, I can access that machine.
Next, my niece’s old ACER laptop – with broken CD drive and TFT scrren, but otherwise working fine – has been setup to run Personal Alpha in the test; A bit small (just less than 1Gb of usable memory, it cannot run FreeAXP, but Personal Alpha does run, with a penalty). It’s connected to the test-LAN by wire, and to the home LAN by WiFi. On that machine, I put the .ISO file that contains the installation disk – and mentioned that as a disk container. This worked faultless – and I could install the fieldtest 8.4 kit on it’s primary disk.
A second netwrok has also been set up, but there still is something not working. No big deal, though. It’s for later use anyway.
Next stage is setting up an IP-based cluster over that test-LAN. Same LAN means that cluster-traffic over LAT will take precedence, but engineering has supplied a method to raise the priority of IP-based cluster traffic, so that limitation can now be lifted.