On 27 Sep 2018, at 17:36, Jon Forrest <nobozo(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Right, and I am that Jon Forrest
Well, made a fool of myself there!
It's been a while, but what I remember is that
DEC actually published
their own method for doing this but it was surprisingly cumbersome.
What I described was incredibly simple but effective. I ran many
Alphas this way with no problems at all.
On OSF/1 T1.0, which is what we got shipped with our first Alphas, we were categorically
told by REO that we were on our own. At the time there were four Alphas in the UK: three
were ours and one was at REO running OpenVMS in the morning and OSF/1 in the afternoon (or
vice-versa) and we spent a long weekend napping on the machine room floor and on caffeine
trying to figure out how to get /usr mounted despite the SIA startup script as we had no
choice and the cluster needed to be up as it had cost a small fortune.
The later DEC solution I recall requiring more disk space on the clients, which we didn’t
have, but I’m sure that later ships with sufficient disk space had less issues.
Another weekend was spent getting TeX and LaTeX running with ghostscript MX’d from the
Ultrix MIPS binary as we just couldn’t get it to compile. That it even worked using MX
remains one of the most beautiful surprises of that install.
Arrigo