Ultrix 3.0 - help
Robert Myers
rmyers at net1.ucsd.edu
Sat Jun 3 09:31:05 AEST 1989
Hello Ultrix 3.0 installers:
I'm having some problems and would appreciate any kind of useful
answers or suggestions.
Hardware:
1 VAXstation II with
5MB ram
Monochrome system
DEQNA
RD54 hard disk
TK50 tape drive
RX50 dual diskette drive
1 VAXstation II/GPX with
5MB ram
Color (8-plane) system
DEQNA
DHV11, 8 channel MUX
RD53 and RD54 hard disks
Emulex controller for Cypher 880, a nine track tape drive
TK50 tape drive
DT2651 and DT2658 Data Translation image processing boards
The installation:
OK, this was the first time I had ever done a major op. system
installation. I wasn't absolutely sure I could do it, but by looking
through the installation manuals I figured it wouldn't be too hard.
The VAXstation II installation went perfectly, and I added the
necessary network configuration stuff. The system has
been up and on the local net for about 2 weeks now.
The VAXstation II/GPX installation also went pretty well. On
installation all the devices were recognized except the DT boards.
This wasn't too surprising since they have a custom device driver, not
supported by DEC. I figured I would just test the new operating system
without the driver, leaving the boards on the Q-bus but inaccessible.
I added the network configuration stuff in single user mode, then
rebooted into multi-user mode. Once the login prompter came up, I
tried to log in as root. It seemed to accept the login, the screen
was filled only with the background cross-hatch pattern. Then
blank lines were written directly to the console, the screen
blinked, the blank lines were now filled with text, apparently
columns of hexadecimal numbers. The machine was frozen, so I
pressed the halt button and rebooted to single user mode. I did an
fsck, which found problems in the root partition. I messed around
for at least two days with this problem, and finally found that if
I didn't execute "ifconfig qe0 ..." in /etc/rc.local it would at least
let me log in without frying the machine. In other words, if
networking is disabled, the system runs fine.
I tried taking all of the stuff concerning the DT board's device driver
from the previous Ultrix 2.0 system, then reinstalling it. The kernel
was rebuilt successfully, but when I tried to boot from it, the machine
died in the middle of reboot with a "panic" message. After a couple of
shots at this, I gave up.
Now, when Ultrix 2.0 was on this machine, everything worked
perfectly. So, as far as I'm concerned the hardware is in good
working order. Under Ultrix 3.0, everything except the networking
seems to be working fine. Of course, the DT image processing boards
aren't usable since the kernel doen't have the device drivers for
them yet.
So, the only pieces of hardware I'm wondering about right now are
the Color video subsystem and the DT boards.
Questions:
Are there any known bugs in Ultrix 3.0 involving the Color video 8-plane
subsystem or the DEQNA on the VAXstation II/GPX?
Is it possible that having the DT boards on the Q-bus without their
device driver in the kernel is causing any of these problems?
Is there anything different about device drivers for Ultrix 3.0
compared to Ultrix 2.0?
Is there anything I'm missing here, or being stupid about?
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.
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