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VaxStation 3100

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maxfli

Experienced Member
Joined
Oct 21, 2012
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197
I’m looking at purchasing two vaxstation 3100 systems to create a cluster. The only problem is that the systems don’t have any hard drives.

My question is do I have to used a DEC hard drive or will any 50 pin scsi drive work?
 
Just about any drive will work. Do plan for the filesystem size though. Too small and you'll fill it up before finishing the base install (my 3100's came with 100MB drives!) and too big can cause issues too. 4GB should be a good sweet spot. my uV3600 has a 3.6GB DSSI drive and several 600MB DSSI drives. The 600MB drives have been a good fit as long as I haven't gone hog wild with all the compilers and other stuff on the 7.x install media.
 
You'll need a disk not larger than 1Gb for the boot disk (not sure for the 3100 76).
 
I saw in the manual that the biggest drive they had in them would be around 400mb. They can be bought on eBay for $63.
 
osf1 said:
You'll need a disk not larger than 1Gb for the boot disk (not sure for the 3100 76).
Click to expand...
Depending on how nuts you want to go, there's a patch for the boot roms that removes this limitation, for the early 3100s that have the problem.
 
Can I boot the Vaxstation over the network? I have a MicroVax 3100-40 with Open VMS installed.
 
maxfli said:
Can I boot the Vaxstation over the network? I have a MicroVax 3100-40 with Open VMS installed.
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Yes, you can boot it as a cluster satellite system. You'll have to enable custering on the other system, and cluster config this MicroVAX into it.
 
Are there any good docs that would explain this process?
 
And one more tip: One or more of your cluster nodes can be emulated simh machines, intermixed with real hardware. Especially for experimenting, it can be a useful shortcut
 
nadaveiron said:
And one more tip: One or more of your cluster nodes can be emulated simh machines, intermixed with real hardware. Especially for experimenting, it can be a useful shortcut
Click to expand...
Yep, that's pretty much the easiest way to get VMS onto new hardware - network boot the new hardware VAX into a cluster with a SIMH cluster node, and take advantage of disk serving to write an OS onto the harware system's disk.
 
Virtual Infoservers are a great way to install VMS over the network without having to setup a full cluster first. I have a couple setup to host both VAX and Alpha install media. https://9track.net/simh/infoserver has a guide on setting up simh for serving disc images.
 
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