On 2020-09-08 05:27, Mouse wrote:
I am trying to resurrect an old microVax II and get NetBSD running on it. [...][...]Oh, I forgot to say something. You say you've tried 10base5, so this probably is not relevant in your case, but it might be worth mentioning. I've seen old 10Mb-only Ethernets misbehave oddly when connected to modern autonegotiating hardware. I keep an old 10Mb-only hub around as a glue layer for such machines. If you don't have such a thing, maybe try forcing the configuration of the autonegotiating hardware on the relevant port to 10/half? With a peer as old as a DEQNA you won't get better than 10/half anyway, and it may alleviate some of the issues.
I'm using a DEQNA with a gigbit ethernet switch. And it works fine for me. Also, I have never seen any issues with packet size.
There are some known issues with the DEQNA, specifically it might stop sending/receiving under some circumstances, because of bugs in the microcode. This is known, and as far as I can remember, NetBSD have a fix in the code to unwedge the controller. VMS eventually stopped supporting the DEQNA because of this, while PDP-11 OSes still do support it. I know that the RSX drivers also have code to unwedge the DEQNA.
I think your suggestion about possibly some other machine responding to pings seems likely. There are no good reason why a machine would respond to ping, but not be able to send pings itself. But do use IP addresses, so you don't rely on DNS, which might not be working properly.
Use NetBSD as the mop server instead of Linux is something I would also agree with.
Another point is that current NetBSD might have problems booting using mop, and it's a problem that's been around for some time. So locate a boot file from around NetBSD 4, which works better. It should be good enough to also boot the current installation image.
Booting from tape was known to work at some point, but I seriously doubt anyone have tested it in many years. And it will take forever. Really, netbooting is definitely the preferred way. I use it whenever I need to install on a real machine.
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt%softjar.se@localhost || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol