I have succeeded in building a complete (including the extra apps) working Vax-780 sim running unix 2.0v2 gdts except
for 2 things.
1) Unable to set up to be able print to the host. The device appears to be an LP11 but the
Kernel does not have an LP device (c,major,minor) defined. The sim has an entry for LPT.
2) Any way to network (Ethernet) off the sim to the host? It seems to be possible the tools
are there, but again is not covered anywhere?
As has been suggested before, these sorts of questions are probably much more appropriate for the SIMH mailing list. This mailing list deals with the overall history of UNIX, while the SIMH mailing list is generally more focused on the actual simulation details of these older distributions.
First, it would probably be clearer for everyone if you refer to this distribution by its more common name, SVR2 (System V, Release 2).
Where did you get this distribution? The one I could easily find,
https://archive.org/details/vax-svr2 , has serious filesystem problems that can easily be seen by running an fsck on boot.
But perhaps most importantly, what gave you the idea that there is ethernet support (or indeed networking support of any sort) in this distribution? There are no standard networking commands (ftp, telnet, rsh, etc.) and no network drivers of any sort.
If you want networking support on an older OS that works for VAX SIMH, you almost certainly want to run 4.2BSD. The earliest VAX distribution that I'm aware of that has networking abilities interoperable with modern systems is 4.1C BSD, and in that case I had to backport the DEUNA driver from 4.2BSD to get something that will work with the simulated networking options available.
-Henry