Just a quick update before I hit the sack. I’ve been busy this evening on a number of Retrocomputing activities:

Fibre Broadband Arrived!

This morning a very nice engineer enabled and installed fibre broadband. A quick test revealed a download speed of around 80 Mbit/sec and an upload speed of around 20 Mbit/sec. Cushty. Unfortunately my somewhat esoteric network set up took a bit of licking into shape. I typically use the supplied ADSL modem as just a modem – in bridged mode – to a Mikrotik RouterBoard 2011UiAS-2HnD-IN:

Fortunately – and this could easily have taken all evening – a simple change in the TalkTalk supplied modem/router enabled bridged mode and I was able to set the connection via the Mikrotik RouterOS configuration page:

More problematic was the configuration of firewall filter and NAT rules. Whilst the Mikrotik is comprehensive it’s not always that intuitive. With power comes great responsibility. So I spent a couple of hours this evening sorting these out – I had a half arsed approach working previously which allowed routing through of an external port to an internal machine as long as the port numbers were the same. I also found that the external machine I was using to test the external connection back into my network wasn’t working with non-standard port numbers! I ended up resorting to a fellow-hecnetters VMS box to check SSH and TELNET connectivity.

Although the rules can be configured through a web-interface on the Mikrotik:

It is much easier to cut and paste scripts into the SSH command line interface, this way you can save off the configuration to a file and easily tweak, backup or recreate it.

Here’s a listing of the current NAT rules:

DCPS – DEC’s answer to Ghostscript

Attempting to get DCPS working on BUBBLE. DCPS was DEC’s answer to ghostscript bundled in a VMS queue symbiont format – basically it allowed you to print Postscript, ANSI encoded and TXT files (amongst others) to a postscript printer. This was working once-upon-a-time with the original BUBBLE hardware setup when configured to talk to a Kyocera FS-800 printer, but it broke at some point and I didn’t get it working again.

Now I have this fancy Brother MFC-9970CDW I was keen to get this working, but to no avail. I upgrade from Version 2.3 to Version 2.5 but I can’t persuade it to print more than the burst page. If I capture the output and copy to Linux and attempt to convert using ps2pdf ghostscript throws an error.

The postscript file does contain the text of the file that I’m attempting to print. I’ve put the feelers out for version 2.6 or the last version for the VAX 2.7 – hopefully I can persuade one of those versions to work.

AlphaVM Instance – SLAVE

I’ve previously tried to persuade AlphaVM to boot a snapshot of the important drives in my AlphaServer 1000A instance SLAVE.

Initially I tried this on the HP Microserver using AlphaVM 1.4-ish. This crashed on boot. I found the same issue with the latest test version of AlphaVM compiled for Windows.

So as an alternative I found an Alpha OpenVMS 7.3-2 installation CDROM image and created a new AlphaVM instance with a single DEC RZ59 8.5GB drive. This worked much better and I was able to configure this new instance VICTOR to cluster with BUBBLE the VAX MP instance:

With the resulting cluster, as seen from BUBBLE:

That’s enough for this evening!