mark@sickkids.UUCP (11/10/86)
Is there anyone out there who has a VAX (preferably a 750, though that's
not too crucial) with a DMZ32 and an RL02? If so, and if you'd be willing
to let us have an hour or so of time on it sometime soon, give me a shout.
I can't offer any $$, but perhaps we could repay the favor with a similar
one. Using the machine during bizarre off-hours would be no problem.
In case you're curious, here's our situation: We are the proud(?) owners
of a CPI32-A, the DEC/NorTel computer-PBX interconnect. Unfortunately,
it's not yet been made to work. The DEC half passes all its diagnostics,
including the external loopback tests. Bell claims that the SL-1 half is
also OK. However, when you connect the two by plugging the T1 cable into
both ends, the SL-1 can't establish a connection to the VAX.
One possible problem may be our device driver. We're running 4.1bsd. We
have a DMZ32 driver supplied to us by DEC's Ultrix Engineering Group, which
we've modified appropriately in order to backport it to 4.1. According to
DEC's CSS people (the source of the CPI), the CPI32 looks identical to the
DMZ32, as far as the operating system software is concerned. VMS, at least,
treats the CPI as if it were a DMZ.
Unfortunately, the VAX end of the CPI can't really be tested in isolation.
With any other type of device, we could just plug in a terminal, and see
that characters get sent out to it properly, and that characters typed on
the keyboard get passed back properly to whatever process is reading from
it. With the CPI, though, we can't do this, since it works by transmitting
message packets down the T1 line to the PBX. Sigh.
So, what I'm hoping to do is to confirm that our driver works on a "real"
DMZ, by taking an RL02-bootable version of our 4.1 system to another VAX,
plugging a terminal into the DMZ, and seeing whether everything works OK.
Then, assuming that we can believe DEC when they say that the same driver
should be used for both the DMZ and CPI, we can tell Bell that it's their
problem. On the other hand, we may find that our driver does indeed have
a bug or two, in which case we could fix it/them, and try things out on our
end once again.
One other possibility for addressing this problem would be to get VMS up on
our 750. However, this would mean finding some other system that we could
use to squeeze a bootable/runnable version of VMS onto a single RL02, since
the only other peripherals we have are a pair of RA81s, plus a Brand X tape
drive that VMS doesn't know how to talk to. Can a bare-bones VMS even fit
onto an RL02 these days?
Any help that anyone can offer would be muchly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
--
Mark Bartelt
Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto
416/598-5982
{utzoo,utcs,lsuc,decvax,ihnp4}!sickkids!mark