So, so, so.

Got a little distracted.

To say the least.

Watched Elysium tonight which was very enjoyable. Some serious compute cycles went in to that film. Last night I was attempting, still, to get DCPS to work. Someone has now kindly provided me with Version 2.7 and it’s still not working. Might need to sack that one in.

Other things I’ve been up to:

• accidentally creating a RAID 1+0 array by adding another drive to the boot array – in an attempt to give me a bit more breathing room. So after that completed I migrated the array to RAID 5. All this after copious backups of course.
• My hecnet bridge link to Sweden has been notorious unreliable, some weird configuration issues, so I asked Steve Davidson to try and get the long lost link between BUBBLE (the VAX MP SIMH instance) and his machine on the Eastern Seaboard of the USA. So far I’m getting a lot of ‘Circuit TCP-0-19, Adjacent node address out of range’ messages.
• I hooked up a VT520 to a DECserver 90M to see if the simulators BUBBLE and SLAVE serve connections up via LAT – they do.
• The developer of AlphaVM sorted out why the SLAVE instance was crashing on boot – I had used the same VMS cluster password for both SLAVE and BUBBLE. That might be a good thing long term – but at the moment they are both designed to have their own clusters.
• Browsing eBay for server bits. I bought a 4-port GB network card for less than a tenner – still a firm believer in one emulator <-> one port.
• Trying to work out a back up strategy for the server that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. Considered an external MSA50 or MSA60 Storageworks array, USB3 is a non-starter (no way to provide additional power to the card), eSATA is looking unlikely, GB networking to the HP Microserver seems to be the best way to go.
• Looking at 24 port gigabit managed switches – will need a new one in the basement at the start of my plan to reduce daisy-chaining of switches and improve network performance. Plan is to trunk 2 x 1 gigabit lines between basement and attic.
• Wired up the PP404 line printer to see if that was still talking, but previously I used a franken-connector using at least two adapters, and that has long since disintegrated into pieces and scattered to the four corners of the attic. The cable I tried didn’t work, so that’s still one to try.

That’s about it.

Oh, and I found MGBOOK – a DEC Bookreader application written in Bliss-32 for displaying Bookreader documentation in the terminal (the standard bookreader app is strictly X11 based). It looks rather hansome with it’s SMG rendered windows:

and now the pub calls…