Posted on

26-Jun-2010

Power loss on switch
Since it’s nice, warm weather, I tend to do some computer work in the garden, accessing the network (and the Internet) over wireless.
Today however, this failed. There was no problem connecting to the router, but the laptop kept sttaing “not connected”. Accessing the router’s admin interface wasn’t a problem either, and nothing proved to be wrong. But still, the laptop didn’t get an IP address.
The problem was that the switch that connects all systems, was off power – it’s socket-based power supply was kicked off the wall socket, just enough to lose contact, but too little to drop down…
Pushing it in place solved the problem.
I think I know what went wrong: I’ve scanned a number of documents, and when disconnecting the scanner by removing it’s power connection, I must accidently have tipped to power unit of the switch. That was about 9:00, and since I didn’t do any computer work all day until 19:00 or so, I didn’t notice….
It actually means that web and mail have been obstructed for about 10 hours.
In the system performance logs that I collect on a daily basis, this was noticable, by lack of CPU and paging – and a steady 75% usage o memory. Which also p[roves that it’s just the Intenet – web and mail, in my case, is the main user of system resources.

Well, that was to be expected 🙂

Posted on

23-Jan-2010

New kids on the block
I got my niece’s old ACER laptop, it has a non-working TFT screen and a CD drive that isn’t reckognized by Windows (it seems) but otherwise running fine. That one (nicknamed “Melvin” – after her cat) will be used in testing OpenVMS 8.4 when running PersonalAlpha (and do nothing else).
PersonalAlpha on my company laptop fails to connect over the Loopback interface, but I think that’s due to the fact that I had to disable some interfaces for the VPN connection …

Speaking of PA: It isn’t the only free Alpha-emulator any more. Camiel Ver der Hoeven started working on a ES40 emulator a few years ago, and Bruce Claremont of Migration Specialties joined in to complete the CPU emulation. There will be a commercial version some time this year, but the free version is available in BETA test; the first versions were Windows 64 only, but since last week, a 32-bit version is added.
This has now been installed on my normal workstation – to test it, and to add into the 8.4 fieldtest as well. I started installing it:
It got as far as obtaining the initialisation data for the system disk, but than run into a runtime error… Well, it’s still beta, it’s allowed in that phase :). Ok, contact Bruce and retry.

Next week, I;’ll spend some time in setting up the Cluster-over-IP environment. The links have been set up.

Posted on

17-Jan-2010

Yet another old laptop
The number of old laptops to run the Alpha emulator has, again, increased. My niece switched from a Windows-base machine to MacBook – and I could get her old Acer Asipre system – the TFT screen seems dead, not any sign of output, but the virdeo hardware itself is ok, and an external screen does work – with panning, but that doen’t do any harm. It’s a Windows XP Home system but that’s fine for testing purposes. It is in thr porces of being cleaned and upgraded, and when done, I’ll put some PA disks on it. And perhaps other stuff.
VMS 8.4 testing
One of the new facilities of 8.4 is clustering the VMS systems over IP. And the system named Daphne had to be changed for that. It’s required to have it in a different network, so i had to chnage the IP configuration – to be done anyway since there had been errors from the start. It took some time, but in the end, I succeeded in doing so, but only by using the TCPIP$CONFIG procedure. Changing addresses using TCPIP ifconfig solved the problem momentarily – just in the volatile database. But the persistant data could NOT be changed. At least, I would expect it to be able to change the IP address using TCPIP SET HOST and TCPIP SET CONFIGURATION INTERFACE, but the first failed time aftre time because the host is used as an alias – correct, it is – but removing the alias wan’t possible either, for the same reason.
Moving to a standalone system was no rpoblem either, changing modparams.dat and run Autogen, but I did change the name of cluster_authorize.dat, and a direct reboot from autogen wasn’t executed. Manual reboot did work, though, and after that, I ran cluster_config_Lan to change Daphne to a clusternode, over TCPIP. The next reboot started fine, but since there isn’t a node on the other side, it hung at that point.
I’ll dig into that later.

Posted on

07-Jan-2010

More tests
Got some time to test external access – including VPN – from the company laptop.
The Vista VPN facility seems unable to handle multiple active network drivers – which may make connection for VMS IP-clustering troublesome…. And setting up the connection parameters is not that staight forward, some items (including IPSEC settings) are somewhat hidden. But one of the connections I have set up did work at some point. At least, it was trying to identify the user but hung at that point. It’s very likely this is caused by the company’s public wireless which doesn’t allow anything else but web traffic. Because of that, Telnet and SSH weren’t possible either – and yesterday tests from my ISP have been successful for these. This applies to FTP as well.
I could of course have searched for a connection to the company internal network, where these restrictions do not apply. But that would mean move to another room, and I simply didn’t want to. Since I now know the Vista restrictions, and seem to have a valid set-up, I could try it by other means – later tonight, or tomorrow.

Posted on

06-Jan-2010

New router activated
Setup of the new router being completed – at least, as far as I could do without digging the documentation – I tested the wireless connection to make the last corrections: Change of the interla IP address so it matches the current router. Just in case it would be better to restore the Linksys router, when the Draytek didn’t work as expected. Next, I switched all internal and external connections, throw the power switch of the new router – and waited a while. It takes some time to establish all connections with all logging enabled: getting the connection data (DHCP), connect to the DNS servers and negotiate; setting up internal connections (DNS, for instance), AND handle requests.
First I tried to access the webs using the external names, but it took a few minutes before it succeeded.
Accessing the World Wide Web proved to be easier – I could access extrenal webs before I could access my own. From an external email account, I could send a message – and it arrived in either quarantine (by the spam filter) of in my mailserver. So mail (quite important) is no problem either.
Next, I tried to access the login host of my ISP, but that failed competely. It turned out I would have to set up something specific, after that, TELNETting to my ISP was no problem. From there, I could use Telnet and SSH to access Diana – after I figured out I have made a minor mistake in the port definition.
FTP however is another matter. Both anonymous and non-anonymous FTP fail when data is to be returned – I can make a connection but DIR fails. Setting mode to passive makes access possible. I’ve seen that behaviour before but I cannot recall what’s the cause. It must be some setting in the router’s firewall or NAT definition, that’s for sure. Time to RTFM 🙂
The VPN setting has been prepared but to test it, I’ll need to be outside. Something to test tomorrow.
ISDN to return
This modem can be connected to ISDN directly, and it offers the ability for Voice-over-IP, and ISDN backup. But for that, the ISDN cable – currently used to transport the ADSL signal to my modem – must be restored to it’s original function. Question now is how to get ADSL to my modem? I could of course move the modem near the splitter, but than I’ll have create a connection by CAT-5 cable to the bottom of the house. Something I’ve been considering for quite some time. Perhaps, this is the moment to do it.
Another possibility is using a second IDSL-cable to tarnsport the ADSL signal – that may well be a better solution, there is very little room left…