DCE/RPC NamedPipe Transport emulation

[John E. Malmberg]

On Thu, 6 Sep 2001, Peter Samuelson wrote:
 
> [John E. Malmberg]
> > So those on these lists that are not doing commercial development and
> > can live with the HOBBY license conditions, adding an OpenVMS system
> > to your home network can be done very cheaply.
> 
> Except ... I guess DEC discontinued the VAX some time ago,

Yes, 2000 or 19100 as Luke goes by sometime was quite a while ago.  That
was about the time that the last new from Compaq VAX system was available.
I could be wrong though, there still may be a few new units available, and
who knows what is in the reseller's channel.

VAX is still a supported platform for OpenVMS.  Only of handfull of VAX
systems are no longer supported for running OpenVMS.  Most of those are
systems that did not directly support more than 4M of physical memory
or a local disk that was larger than 150 Mbyte.

Basically some very old antiques.  And also note that just because it is
not supported, does not mean that OpenVMS will not run on them.

To support the equivalent age range, LINUX would need to add support for
80286 systems.

> and Compaq recently decided to drop the Alpha in favor of the HP/Intel
> IA-64. [Insert hisses from the tech crowd.]

New Alpha systems that are faster than currently available systems are
planned to be sold for about 10 years according to the Compaq web site.

It will be about that long before you will be able to find a faster
IA-64 based system.  But IA-64 based OpenVMS systems are expected to
be available in a few years, initially for development purposes.

> So is it actually still possible to buy a new box supported by VMS?

Yes.  Sales are doing well inspite of the general slump in the economy.

Of course most hobbyists do not buy all new machines just to play with.

> Or do you have to get a used one now?  (Of course, there should be lots
> of old vaxen on the market, considering how many were in use in the
> past.)

There are quite a few still in use.  The installed base has been growing
not shrinking.

There are lots of VAXen on the market, you want one with a bootable SCSI
controller, at least 16M for non-local graphics, 32M for local graphics,
plus an ethernet adapter that is not a DEQNA or a DELUA.  Unless you are
really into hardware, avoid q-bus and unibus systems.  Also a SCSI cdrom
that can do 512 byte sectors.

There are also plenty of ALPHAs in the used market, and a large number of
them can run OpenVMS.  The ones that use standard SIMMs are very popular.
Double the memory recommendations.

Unlike the VAX platform, LINUX runs on the ALPHA platform.

> > I have not tried DECNET on LINUX yet.  If the implementation is
> > complete I will probably use it a lot, once I get a LINUX systems
> > running again.
> 
> I don't think the implementation is complete, although I haven't tried
> it.

Too bad, but with both a public specification and OpenSource on LINUX,
this can be fixed if someone is motivated.

-John
wb8tyw at qsl.network
Personal Opinion Only