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Alphaserver 400 4/233 - Should I get it?

Just got my hands on it. It has 2 SCSI drives installed and boots into OpenVMS 8.3. No username/password of course.
Lots to play with, but I need to look into imaging the disks. Theyre... crunchy.
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RAM is maxed out and what I though were crunchy disks turned out to be a bad fan bearing in the CDR drive. Feeling lucky so far.
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g4ugm said:
You can reset the SYSTEM password...


once you have done that you should be OK. I think I would try something like a SCSI2SD to backup the disks. From what I remember the VMS backup command will copy to another disk. I would also export (and re-import) the licences.
Click to expand...
Funny you should mention this. I was following these instructions last night, but I was getting error messages when issuing the `RUN SYS$SYSTEM:AUTHORIZE` command. I did a little research, and it sounds to me like an ACL kind of thing where an executable isn't available or something like that. It was late (and ears ringing lol), so I didn't dig much further.

I'm not surprised. It appears this machine belonged to a large company in a heavily regulated industry (not sure how discrete I need to be). If I let it boot up normally, it's nothing but errors about not being able to reach databases and other resources, so I'm guessing there's not much in the way of sensitive data.

I'm glad to hear the PAKs can be exported. I was wondering if that was possible but didn't want to ask before looking it up.

I don't have any computers with a SCSI controller currently, so I'll need to have a think on how I'll backup the disks.
For upgrading to solid state storage, SCSI2SD looks good, but I'm concerned about SD cards wearing out. I assume OpenVMS writes to disk frequently just like Unix/Linux/WinNT does. I was thinking about maybe using a PiSCSI but with the Pi booting form a proper SSD. Is this crazy?
 
johnnycontrario said:
Totally missed this. Sounds like a good solution. Still wondering about sd card longevity.
Click to expand...

Some suggest getting "Industrial" SD cards.
I just backup the image file if I make any significant changes and take my chances with cheap (but name brand) SD cards.
 
legodude said:
Some suggest getting "Industrial" SD cards.
I just backup the image file if I make any significant changes and take my chances with cheap (but name brand) SD cards.
Click to expand...

I run industrial SD cards in the couple of things I have that use SD as a disk, I haven't had one fail yet whereas I'd burned up several consumer SD cards in the same devices. I buy them from Mouser, they're not stupidly expensive.
 
ZuluSCSI has initiator mode as well. Never tried it, though.
github.com

Initiator Mode and ZuluSCSI

Firmware for the ZuluSCSI advanced SCSI emulator. Contribute to ZuluSCSI/ZuluSCSI-firmware development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com
 
Dang. I can't believe I missed that. Oh well, I've got some extra Pi's collecting dust. I'm hoping that hiding a networked computer inside the case will be useful.

Edit: i have no illusions of running it in initiator mode while the ribbon cable is still attached to the alphaserver. I just think it would be useful to telnet into the Pi to do various things or ssh from a modern laptop.
 
johnnycontrario said:
Funny you should mention this. I was following these instructions last night, but I was getting error messages when issuing the `RUN SYS$SYSTEM:AUTHORIZE` command. I did a little research, and it sounds to me like an ACL kind of thing where an executable isn't available or something like that. It was late (and ears ringing lol), so I didn't dig much further.
Click to expand...
Thats a bit odd. You could try network boot...
 
I'm waiting for my SCSI solution to arrive. I don't know how healthy the spinning rust is, so I'm currently giving them a break until I get them imaged. In the meantime, I've been doing some reading on the filesystem to figure out why I couldn't RUN SYS$SYSTEM:AUTHORIZE. I'm thinking of reproducing the issue in AXPbox to validate my theories. I'll post a new thread if it gives me any trouble or if I learn anything interesting.

Meanwhile, I had a dumb anachronistic idea. This thing has regular PCI slots, so I was wondering how viable a SATA controller would be. I guess the 2 main questions are support in SRM for booting and support in the OS. OpenVMS 8.4 was well into the SATA era, but I don't know if that means anything.
 
johnnycontrario said:
Meanwhile, I had a dumb anachronistic idea. This thing has regular PCI slots, so I was wondering how viable a SATA controller would be. I guess the 2 main questions are support in SRM for booting and support in the OS. OpenVMS 8.4 was well into the SATA era, but I don't know if that means anything.
Click to expand...
Probably not very viable. I do have it in my DS10s, but it was a job to do and it's not bootable. I doubt the AS400 has firmware new enough to recognize a SATA HDA as the latest (and last) Alpha firmware for the DS10 did not. This means you have to configure the card and any disks in another system which does recognize the HDA card. In my case, it was an HP P410 SmartArray and I had to acquire an HP system that was supported and a Windows Server version that worked with the HP ORCA SmartArray management tool. I guess there are non RAID SATA HDAs around. You need to look in the driver database (SYS$SYSTEM:SYS$CONFIG.DAT) for your version of OpenVMS to see if there is anything compatible. Again, you won't be able to boot from it, but once booted you can set it up as a data disk. It might be a bit labor intensive, but you could make the ZuluSCSI/SCSI2SD/PiSCSI the boot drive and configure swap/paging/user/data etc on the SATA drive... Well maybe not the page/swap. That might take some investigation on how soon the drivers are loaded so the SATA drives are available. Perhaps a small primary swap/page on the SCSI and then a larger secondary page/swap on the SATA.
 
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