HP/DEC/Compaq

I have got an rx2620 (1.6GHz dual Madison, 16GB RAM, with MP). The system works properly, and I have had Windows Server 2008 R2 for Itanium running, as well as Debian 7 ia64. I have 3 questions:

I want to run OpenVMS, but I can't connect to DECUServe to get a hobbyist ID. Is there another free way of getting a hobbyist ID/hobbyist copy of OpenVMS/License?

Is there a HP-UX or Integrity VM 'hobbyist program' ?

When I recieved the machine, it had two cards fitted labelled as 'AH094AX'. I believe these are Dual Port Fibre Channel adapters, but I cannot find any information about supported OSes or Drivers. What are they, and what OSes are supported?

They might be doing some maintenance over the weekend. It's a volunteer organization -- I'd give them another try in a day or two.

If you can't wait, go to http://plato.ccsscorp.com/hobbyist_registration.php3 and check the pull-down listing at the top titled "Choose a Chapter," and you can see if one of the other organizations might be a possibility. (You may have to then search for the organization, but at least you'll have a name.)

Good luck!

Not just a weekend thing, been trying for 2 or 3 weeks! Connection times out both using PuTTY/WinNT over a ja.net internet connection and using telnet/Linux over a Virgin Media internet connection...

Thanks for pointing me to the form. Is that the correct one to use?

Knuckx wrote: Not just a weekend thing, been trying for 2 or 3 weeks!

Oh. Hmm... That's much more disconcerting.

Knuckx wrote: Thanks for pointing me to the form. Is that the correct one to use?

That's the only form that worked for myself and others late last year / earlier this year. The OpenVMS.org site had it's "Hobbyist registration" link pointing to it. That site was still working earlier this weekend, but I see it's not responding just now when I refreshed the page. Curiouser and curioser...

VMS Software, Inc's web site is up, but I'm not sure they have an official connection to either of the other sites in question.

I've tried multiple times over the last two months to get a renewed hobbyist license using that form (with a valid Encompass ID) and never received any kind of response. I just assumed the hobbyist program was dead, and as the only thing I now have to run VMS is SimH, I just left it. If you do manage to get a license, please do let me know as I'd seriously consider getting some physicsal kit again to run it, but if you can't even get a hobbyist license now then it's pointless

Okay, I went off looking in comp.os.vms and found a thread ( here ) that it was taken down for an expected two weeks at the start of October to move to VMS Software Inc's offices outside of Boston, and it was still dragging on as of November 30th.

Hopefully it's good to know we're not the only ones seeing this / affected?

I gave up trying to get a hobbyist license. At least my VAXstation came with 6.2 "full" preinstalled with no license termination date.

I don't blame anybody for being discouraged, but DECUServe *will* come back. I take it as an encouraging sign that a good chunk of the active hobbyist organizers are busy with the VSI startup suff.

Cameron, when were you trying? I renewed my DECUServe membership back in March and got my PAKs in April. tomvos got his PAKs in April. Was it not working for you over the spring and summer?

I don't remember when it was, at least a number of months back. But I'd tried over and over up until then. I got a DECUS #, submitted it, and received a big fat load of nothing, no paks, no reply.

If the point of the hobbyist program is to increase the VMS user base, it's backfiring. I gave up until I bought this VAXsta with all the licenses included.

HP/UX can be installed without any license requirements. I'm not sure of the legality of this - probably OK for development purposes I would have thought but certainly not for production use. However, it all works without any issues.

OpenVMS is in a state of transition at the moment as HP and VSI work out who is responsible for what. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some short-term ramifications for the Hobbyist programme, it's probably not the top of their priority list right now.

Cheers, Mark.

HP/UX does not ask for licenses until you install a bundle that needs a license that your Operating Environment doesn't include. For a Base OE, that means you'll get the OS with some basic stuff here and there, but the fancy software will ask for a codeword. If you happen to have a copy of DCOE... well, virtually anything will install without asking questions.

And yes, that really isn't legal not even for development purposes. But as long as you don't run any production workloads on it, I doubt anyone will care.

I hope they get the VMS hobbyist site sorted out soon - my PAKs expire in 5-6 weeks or so, if memory serves me right... it's easy enough to generate your own, but I prefer to keep it 100% clean

Sometime between today and yesterday decuserve.org changed IP addresses; telnetting now returns with an immediate disconnect, instead of a wait & timeout.

The web server seems to be up and serving a page as well!

Heres hoping it all gets sorted out shortly.

Thanks for the info about HPUX, media of any IA-64 build seems to be impossible to find tho .

Anyone got any idea about those Fibre Channel cards?

Well, when it comes to HP-UX for IA64 builds, there is always the set of images on the HP FTP:

ftp://ftp.hp.com/ftp1/pub/openvms/openvmsft/

This looks like an OpenVMS dir with cryptic contents, but for the trained eye: 5014-1449 is the internal codename of HP-UX 11.31 Base OE DVD 1, and 5014-1450 is DVD 2. It won't get you very far for fancy apps (you'd need a better OE than Base for that), and of course you must have a valid support contract to use it, but HP has these images publicly online (they are aware of this, too; I've notified them when I still worked there, and got a response saying they knew, and they were there to stay). There's a couple of VMS images/files in there too, but those are outdated compared to the hobbyist provided ones, iirc.

The cards are dual port PCI-X 4Gbps fibrechannel adapters. I can't find much on them right away - but they're Integrity supported, which means any supported HP-UX on your machine will be able to use them, and VMS likely too (storage adapters are generally not the kind of boards that lack support across OSes).

Alver wrote: Well, when it comes to HP-UX for IA64 builds, there is always the set of images on the HP FTP:

ftp://ftp.hp.com/ftp1/pub/openvms/openvmsft/

This looks like an OpenVMS dir with cryptic contents, but for the trained eye: 5014-1449 is the internal codename of HP-UX 11.31 Base OE DVD 1, and 5014-1450 is DVD 2.

Thanks! They did not want to unpack from their zip file(s) though; I ended up using Universal Extractor, and even that complained...

Alver wrote: It won't get you very far for fancy apps (you'd need a better OE than Base for that)

Does it have a C compiler?

Alver wrote: The cards are dual port PCI-X 4Gbps fibrechannel adapters. I can't find much on them right away - but they're Integrity supported, which means any supported HP-UX on your machine will be able to use them, and VMS likely too (storage adapters are generally not the kind of boards that lack support across OSes).

Sadly I don't have any other FC devices... I might see about selling them.

Knuckx wrote: Thanks! They did not want to unpack from their zip file(s) though; I ended up using Universal Extractor, and even that complained...

There's z01 and z02 files too; I suppose they're multi-file zip archives, and you'll need all three to extract (the .zip files themselves are just over 1GB in size, which is way less than I remember for the isos.). I can't vouch for the images themselves, my machines run other OEs.

Knuckx wrote: Does it have a C compiler?

Nope. aCC comes separately, and requires a codeword (surprise ) but gcc for IA64 is quite good - I *do* have aCC, but I only use it rarely (most OSS code makes aCC barf... welcome to the world of GNUisms in code ). HP used to distribute an excellent aCC-built gcc depot on their own site, but I can't seem to locate it anymore (they may have pulled it). I've put the archive for gcc 4.7.0 up for grabs: https://upload.vanalboom.org . Use code 82UMG8SIBP6T7Q7SHS2I0YA2KHA513YO to get to the download button. Both 32bit HPPA, 64bit HPPA and (obviously 64bit) IA64 build are there.

Knuckx wrote: Sadly I don't have any other FC devices... I might see about selling them.

You can always try. Most people don't have FC at home though, so I'm not sure you'll find that many buyers.

Knuckx wrote: They did not want to unpack from their zip file(s) though; I ended up using Universal Extractor, and even that complained...

same here. i tried different programs and names but no luck with whatever i did

Hm, not even when all three files (.zip, .z01, .z02) are present? I'd give it a try, but I don't feel like pulling 4GB of data over the contractor DSL crap line

EDIT: well, I did pull it in, but over SSH to the home server... makes a difference in time. It is indeed a multi-file split zip. What to do (on Linux or OSX):


... and you get the .iso. Looks and mounts okay too:



Repeat for the other. Silly there isn't a way of using a pipe, but 3GB of extra temp disk space never killed anyone.

I have, of course, deleted the files right after testing them because I don't own the proper support contracts to run this particular OE.

Oh, I got them to unpack correctly, with matching CRC32's; by pretty much your method - concat the files together in order z01+z02+zip, feed to Universal Extractor.

As for the HP GCC: http://h21007.www2.hp.com/portal/site/d ... 5d6e10RCRD

Alver wrote:

Code: Select all

$ mv 5014-1449_1.z01 5014-1449.z01
$ mv 5014-1449_2.z02 5014-1449.z02
$ zip -s 0 5014-1449.zip --out 5014-1449-unsplit.zip
$ unzip 5014-1449-unsplit.zip


what a mess, could they have done it any more twisted?
anyway thanks of course for the links and the "how to extract" guide


EDIT: no idea what version of zip you used but neither debian nor osx could handle it.
EDIT2: ended up concatting them manually and throwing that at Universal Extractor. no other program i had could handle it. a very weird way of packing something

foetz wrote: EDIT: no idea what version of zip you used but neither debian nor osx could handle it.

Eh, zip 3.0-3... debian oldstable

It's probably related to lack of support for large files on one of the fileservers at HP; it's obviously split in Windows zip - that can extract from a multi file zip directly. Linux unzip can't as of yet (since normally, no one uses it anyway...).