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Re: Upgrade of Alpha Open VMS 7.1 to boot on a DS-20E

 
Allan Dillon
Occasional Advisor

Upgrade of Alpha Open VMS 7.1 to boot on a DS-20E

What patches are required to upgrade a 7.1 system to boot on a DS-20E
What is required before DEC AXPVMS 712 UPDATE V3.0.

When I try this I get "product DEC AXPVMS VMS, to which maintenance product DEC ASPVMS 712_UPDATE_V3.0 applies, was not found.
14 REPLIES 14
Hein van den Heuvel
Honored Contributor

Re: Upgrade of Alpha Open VMS 7.1 to boot on a DS-20E

Please consider going to 7.3-2, if not 8.3

Hein.
Allan Dillon
Occasional Advisor

Re: Upgrade of Alpha Open VMS 7.1 to boot on a DS-20E

Thanks for your quick responce.
I would if I could avoid the TCPIP upgrade.
Is that possible ?
Steven Schweda
Honored Contributor

Re: Upgrade of Alpha Open VMS 7.1 to boot on a DS-20E

> What patches are required to upgrade a 7.1
> system to boot on a DS-20E

The question is, "What is the minimum VMS
version supported on a DS20E?"

According to:

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/10445_na/10445_na.html

Minimum OS support: Tru64 UNIX V4.0F,
OpenVMS V7.1-2 or V7.2-1

"DEC AXPVMS 712 UPDATE V3.0" is a patch kit
for VMS V7.1-2, not for V7.1, hence that
complaint.

To get from V7.1 to V7.1-2, I believe that
you need the medium kit for V7.1-2. Patches
won't do it.

As I don't pay for this stuff, I, too, would
certainly jump to at least V7.3-2.

> I would if I could avoid the TCPIP upgrade.
> Is that possible ?

Nowadays, there's pretty much a 1-to-1
correspondence between VMS versions and
TCPIP versions. VMS V7.3-2 needs TCPIP V5.4,
VMS V8.3 needs TCPIP V5.6, and so on.

What makes a TCPIP upgrade a problem? (Or a
worse problem than the VMS upgrade?) (V5.4
is bad enough. Who'd want to stay at
something older?)
Allan Dillon
Occasional Advisor

Re: Upgrade of Alpha Open VMS 7.1 to boot on a DS-20E

We communicate to a Yokogawa gateway. When I tried to communicate with VMS 7.3-2 it failed. With VMS 7.1 it worked.
So I was trying to see if I could get the 7.1 + patches to run on the DS-20E.

Thanks again for your ideas and help.
Volker Halle
Honored Contributor

Re: Upgrade of Alpha Open VMS 7.1 to boot on a DS-20E

Allan,

welcome to the OpenVMS ITRC forum.

What problem are you trying to solve ?

As Steven already told you, you can't run OpenVMS V7.1 on a DS20E, it requires at least V7.1-2. To get to V7.1-2, you need to upgrade OpenVMS via the OpenVMS Alpha V7.1-2 Operating System CD.

Volker.
Allan Dillon
Occasional Advisor

Re: Upgrade of Alpha Open VMS 7.1 to boot on a DS-20E

Now it gets silly.

On a single ethernet DEC 3600s the VMS 7.2-2
does communicate.

On the DS-20E with 2 ethernet cards it doesn't. I have done a
mc ncp set circ ewa-0 state off
verified with a tcpip ping test
so only 1 port "connected" still no luck.

Config of system ?
Config of second ethernet card ?
EWA-0 is 100MBit/sec
EWA-1 is 10MBit/sec is that a factor ?

I don't think it is the TCPIP version now.

Tricky hey ?
Steven Schweda
Honored Contributor

Re: Upgrade of Alpha Open VMS 7.1 to boot on a DS-20E

> Now it gets silly.

It certainly gets confusing.

> On a single ethernet DEC 3600s the VMS
> 7.2-2 does communicate.

What's a "DEC 3600s"? Communicate how> With
what?

> Config of system ?

That's one of the things I'd like to know.

> Tricky hey ?

Hard to say, with so little useful info.

Did I miss something, or did you never
describe the actual problem which you are
trying to solve, what the equipment is, and
how it's all connected? It night be nice to
see what you did, what happened when you did
it, and what you expected to happen instead.

You may know what you're talking about, but I
don't see how a casual reader could have a
clue. As I recall, this thread began with a
question about a VMS upgrade. Now it seems
to be a about a communication problem. I'm
lost.
Allan Dillon
Occasional Advisor

Re: Upgrade of Alpha Open VMS 7.1 to boot on a DS-20E

These Alpha boxes are used to communicate with Yokogawa ECGW3 gateways.

PASCAL code on the VMS uses Sys$Assign, $QIO
calls to communicate through a channel associated with the INET device socket "UCX$Device".

This works on the DEC3600s but NOT the DS-20E.

This DS-20E is supposed to replace a VAX 4600
with 2 ethernet cards. It communicates to 2 networks (1 people, 1 instrumentation).

I'm trying to replace this old VAX (VMS 7.1 UCX 4.2).

What I've tried.

DEC3600s VMS 7.1 instrument network (only) communicates :)

DEC3600s VMS 7.2.2 instrument network (only)
communicates :)

DS-20E VMS 7.2.2 people network and instrument network NO communication :(

The error message is 556 - %System-F-Timeout, device timeout

As the software is the same (7.2-2) I was hoping that I needed to do TCPIP config some how.

Sorry I am so bad at describing the problem precisely. Does the above help at all ?


Hoff
Honored Contributor

Re: Upgrade of Alpha Open VMS 7.1 to boot on a DS-20E

Regarding your timeout, that could be a whole host of errors, from network hardware to your host configuration to a hardware problem to a software problem, or otherwise.

(Without intending to be rude, a general and high-level text description of what the Pascal source code is doing here is not likely going to be helpful; there's just way too much going on here within the code, and within the underlying configuration, and within the configuration of the LAN(s) and subnet(s).)

This timeout could easily be a latent source code bug that was exposed by the move from V7.1 on a uniprocessor to a more current OpenVMS version and TCP/IP Services version on a multiprocessor system such as the AlphaServer DS20E configuration.

Given the code works on the "instrument" network (subnet?), and fails when connected on both the "instrument" and the "people" network, this could certainly imply the network configuration and routing might also be a trigger for the error. Or something flaky in the IP stack. But I'd start out with an attempt to establish connectivity with ping and such.

Stephen Hoffman
HoffmanLabs LLC

--

FWIW, there is no such box as a "DEC3600" system. There does exist a DEC 3000 model 600 series, which is what I will assume you are working with here. If so, that's an old TURBOchannel Alpha box. There are a number of other VAX and Alpha boxes with similar model names, too.