[Simh] Making tape/disk images

[Vince Mulhollon]

On Wed, May 05, 2010 at 09:31:43AM +0800, Michael Richter wrote:
> On 4 May 2010 05:34, Vince Mulhollon <vince at mulhollon.com> wrote:
> > Wanna "session log"
> > on a permanently operating emulator, make the timeout like 7200 seconds.
> Wouldn't just setting a log file on the console do the trick for this?  (*set
> console log=/path/to/my/session/log.txt*)

Heres some scenarios.  When I was taking a COBOL class (early 00s) I
set up a box running hercules... for about one continuous semester.  
There are all kinds of interesting issues when you try that, if I recall 
SMF volume would fill itself up with performance logs after awhile or 
something like that.  There was some other issue with temp volumes?  
Its been awhile, I'm not sure anymore.  I think the turnkey guys later 
patched that so that theoretically a turnkey box could run hands 
off "forever".

I'm not involved in the VAX scene, but I'd think people in that HECNET 
thing would enjoy daily logs of their virtual machines.

I also ran TOPS-10 for a couple months, although I don't remember why.
I recall it worked pretty well.

Then there was the time I realized my network accessible SBC6120 was more 
expensive than a network accessible Soekris box that uses less watts than 
my clock radio...  Leading to simh-pdp8 on an old Soekris box, which took
years to burn out the CF flash card on the Soekris box (new CF would
probably last forever).  Anyway thats another situation of multi-week
runtimes.  OS/8 forever!

Anyway, thats what I'm getting at, multi-week emulation session, with
a separate log file of each human login session.

I could reconnect to screen, ctrl-E out of a running session, rename the
console log to the new day, but why not automate it, especially if the
same code makes a great printer "burster" when the timeout is configured 
extremely low...