Day: July 7, 2008

More installations
On the Personal Alpha – normally named “Persephone”, or Prese, for DECNet – I installed quite a bunch of software: Languages to start with, and that caused a new systemdisk container to be made of 4 Gb – the max – to hold all software. Most could be done using the program that resides on the CD, just Cobol required a different approach because the cdmenu program didn’t find an installable product – so this one needed to be done by hand. But at end, all major languages are installed but need to be started. I also installed FMS and DECForms, and would like to have ACMS as well – but that requires RdB, CDD and a working DECNet connection.
DecNet is some other thing I would like to have running, and on the PA environment it was fairly easy – but to get it to work, I found I needed Diana to be configured as an end-node – it didn’t work as an L1 router. Problem however is, how to restart DECNet without interrupting the rest of the network traffic? I tried long ago and cause the system to crash – requiring a reboot to get it fixed…Well, wait for a next boot.
It came earlier than anticipated.
Retry the cluster
I retried the shared-SCSI cluster once more, not to get it running but to get output to be discussed with Colin Butcher (of XDelta) who offered me a hand in this installation during this year’s bootcamp. He’s too busy getting a big cluster up-and-running at the moment and I’m not in a hurry so he can take his time and answer when he thinks he can.
In this process, I started the AlphaServer 400 from it’s own internal disk, but all licenses were expired. This was known and easy to get by, the procedure is available – on the disk containg the clusterwide files, which is connected on shared SCSI. I mounted it – but this was a mistake: It caused Diana to hang and I had to reset it the hard way by pushing the RESET button….
DECNet was now working: I could access Diana from the PA using DECNet, by address and by name. And the other way round as well.
As a side effect, I could also check what was properly added in the startup yesterday, and what was missing. RdB, for example, wasn’t started because the procedure taking care of all RdB stuff wasn’t invoked. My change to the home page text – that logical – was properly done, I got the default’ Rebooted’ homepagetext – so that’s good. The wiki isn’t displayed properly – again a missing logical that I should have added. But RdB and related software were started nicely. At least, at first glance.
Somewhat more on RdB
But there was still something with RdB: the TCP service RDBSERVER didn’t start, because the user wasn’t known, something must have been wrong during installation. It wasn’t solved easily – I could imagine the username would have been TDB$REMOTE72 – but that didn’t work either. So I stopped the database monitor, removed the service and redid the installation. In the IVP the database – and the service – were now started as it should.
Although it seems the CDD is installed – CDD logicals have been defined, and the package has started – manually, it’s not yet in the startup – the command I would expect: CDO is not known. Well, it may be something else, this is to be looked at as well.