topic Re: SIMH and Ethernet Connectivity in Operating System - OpenVMS

SIMH and Ethernet Connectivity

Rob Buxton — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:10:36 GMT

Hi All,
We have several ageing VAXes (some in production still) and I've been looking at SIMH as a way of providing cover for the development VAXes.

The base hardware is an HP Proliant DL380 with Debian Etch as the OS. I've installed SIMH, configured up the ini file and installed VMS 7.3 successfully. TCPIP & DECNET Plus have been installed
But I cannot get it to talk to the outside world. I installed a separate Ethernet card (it's an Intel Pro/1000 Quad Port).
Of the four ports I'm using the one seen by Linux as eth5. I can see that has connected.
I've tried with the Linux eth5 port configured and unconfigured. When the port is configured I can ping devices from the Linux host using that port.

From the emulated VAX there's an Ethernet device under LANCP and the interface is there under TCPIP. They're mapped to the eth5 port with the lines below in the vax.ini file.
set xq mac=08-00-2B-AA-BB-CC
attach xq eth5

There's a web page I've been following;
http://www.wherry.com/gadgets/retrocomputing/vax-simh.html

Any further hints as to what might be stopping this. It would allow me to possibly retire some of the MV3100s I have still running that are acting as various hot spares!

Re: SIMH and Ethernet Connectivity

David B Sneddon — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:29:30 GMT

Rob,

Don't know if it is still the case, but I recall
that if you want to "write" to the interface you
need to start simh with privilege i.e.
sudo ./vax

Dave

Re: SIMH and Ethernet Connectivity

Hoff — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 01:32:37 GMT

Here's the audience to ask your simh questions, if you haven't already...

http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh

There was a discussion of XQ mapping in the last issue or two...

Re: SIMH and Ethernet Connectivity

Rob Buxton — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:17:37 GMT

Problem was in the Debian build of SIMH itself, we installed the later version from the "unstable" branch and it's now working. It successfully joined our Development Cluster as well.
Thanks for the link to that group, it could come in handy.