HP/DEC/Compaq

Hi, just thought I'd share this one. I recently bought for $1 a brand NEW VAX and documented the unpacking. Some of you may feel the desire to wax nostalgia. I have documented it here:

http://deviate.fi/~uridium/newvax/newvax.html

Take it easy.

So you probably have permanent PAKs. Lucky.

I do have some, but you can get PAK's from the OpenVMS Hobbyist site if you wish for free.

You just need a DECUS/Encompass membership. There's a few free ones around if you hunt some out.

Go here: http://www.openvmshobbyist.org/licenses.php

Punch in your details as per your chapter membership number (they will need to push your details to the hobbyist site ..usually takes a week and you can email them to hurry up *Grin*). This thing generates license for a year.

Yeah, still seems like I'm having to redo them all the time (years go by quickly as you get older) - would be nice if they were permanent

Wow! That's quite a find, nice box.

My problem is that I wait until the end of the year to relicense, and more than occasionally the PAKs expire and I'm stuck typing in several PAKs before I can get UCX going to ftp in the rest of the licenses. Unexpiring PAKs for VMS, users, and networking would be very nice, but all of my machines were either ex-hobbyist, ex-CSLG, or disks pulled.

Even when I don't wait it still takes a while to remove the old licenses and reinstall, and the years do go by fast when you get ancient.

*Grin* Nah, your doin it wrong!

1) Bring old girl up in a conversational boot.
2) do a:
$ LICENSE DELETE *<return>
3) By hand type in 2 licenses for VAX-VMS && UCX (So base + UCX)
4) by hand run:
$ @[VMS$COMMON.SYSMGR]TCPIP$CONFIG.COM
Start up your tcpip stack. Then edit your 104pak to remove the UCX license, or license will get sand
when you process it and say "Oop! already done you.. stopping!" Then ftp the 104pak over and @run it.
Reboot and your done. You only need two though.

Job done! But yes, your making lots of work for yourself. You can also if you want to de-register it quickly go and remove the LMF$LICENSE file but I see no point when step 2 works. Also, you can do a nice DCL script to monitor machines and mail you when it's getting low. I have a daily batch queue that reruns a bunch of scripts I don't want scheduled that checks it. That makes it useful. I have the vax4000's on hobbyist licenses so I've become quite accustomed to doing it all over the years.

Take care.

Yeah, I started deleting the license file about 2 years ago. What's really nice is when I catch the machines before the licenses expire, and I can just ftp them over, nuke the license file, and then run the scripts.

I've only been that coordinated one year, though.

Nice vintage hardware, and brand-new to boot...lucky, lucky you!

Did i mention you're a lucky person?

awesome collection indeed!

I am actually using one MicroVAX but without TCP/IP for professional use still, kermit to communicate via a Sun to the company LAN.

Also our once big cluster is reduced to a emulated VAX with everything saved on since mid 80'''s my original account is still there but logged on since ~96-97, now I have a consultant account instead.

I miss the cluster where we all 100's did work on.

Time to reread "The soul of a new machine" almost

/michael