[TUHS] Re: Vax-780 with unix 2.0v2 gdts questions

[Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1816 bytes --]

On Sun, 19 Mar 2023 at 09:11, KenUnix <ken.unix.guy@gmail.com> wrote:

> I have succeeded in building a complete (including the extra apps) working
> Vax-780 sim running unix 2.0v2 gdts except
> for 2 things.
>
> 1) Unable to set up to be able print to the host.  The device appears to
> be an LP11 but the
> Kernel does not have an LP device (c,major,minor) defined. The sim has an
> entry for LPT.
>
> 2) Any way to network (Ethernet) off the sim to the host? It seems to be
> possible the tools
> are there, but again is not covered anywhere?
>
>
As has been suggested before, these sorts of questions are probably much
more appropriate for the SIMH mailing list.  This mailing list deals with
the overall history of UNIX, while the SIMH mailing list is generally more
focused on the actual simulation details of these older distributions.

First, it would probably be clearer for everyone if you refer to this
distribution by its more common name, SVR2 (System V, Release 2).

Where did you get this distribution?  The one I could easily find,
https://archive.org/details/vax-svr2 , has serious filesystem problems that
can easily be seen by running an fsck on boot.

But perhaps most importantly, what gave you the idea that there is ethernet
support (or indeed networking support of any sort) in this distribution?
There are no standard networking commands (ftp, telnet, rsh, etc.) and no
network drivers of any sort.

If you want networking support on an older OS that works for VAX SIMH, you
almost certainly want to run 4.2BSD.  The earliest VAX distribution that
I'm aware of that has networking abilities interoperable with modern
systems is 4.1C BSD, and in that case I had to backport the DEUNA driver
from 4.2BSD to get something that will work with the simulated networking
options available.

-Henry

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2314 bytes --]