SMART@ditmelb.OZ.AU (Robert Smart) (05/18/88)
I put VMS 4.6 and 4.7 on an RD53 with no problem. I didn't attempt to go the Upgrade route: that does require a lot of disk because it has to have two copies of VMS binaries on the disk at once. I had to go to VMS instead of microVMS to make a LAVC for my VAXstation 2000s. I might mention a couple of things about that. On a station with an RD32 the satellite_config procedure initializes the disk with a cluster size of 3 which is silly. You then have to fiddle around: create a pagefile on boot, do a minimum startup, reinit the disk, and recreate the page and swap files to get a cluster size of 1. On a diskless station it insists on creating the page and swap files on the system disk (not too good if it's an RD53). To change this you need to create a satellite_page.com file modelled on the one that is created for a disked station: this has to mount one of the other disks on the boot node before setting the page and swap files there. On the subject of cluster sizes: I like to make them as small as possible since every file wastes half a cluster (allocated but not used) on average, and memory is now cheap. When I initialized my Fujitsu 2361A it insisted that a cluster size of 1 was too small, so I made it 2. When I went to initialize an NEC 2363 (which is nearly twice as many blocks) I expected it to say that 2 is too small, and insist on 3 or 4. It didn't: it allowed 2. I hope this isn't just because the test in init doesn't allow for such big disks. Anyway it seems to work. Bob Smart, CSIRO Division of Information Technology, Australia