[Simh] VAX Tape Emulation?

[Larry Baker]

Zane,

You didn't say what kind of Alpha you have.  I just bought a used 72GB SCSI drive for our Alpha DS20E.  That's plenty big enough to hold many Backup Save Sets from your VAXes, I assume.  VAXes can backup over DECnet from Standalone Backup, you know.  Using SIMH, you don't even have to do that.  You can mount the boot disk for one VAX on another one to back it up over any network that your VAX can reach.  Or, you can replicate my DECnet-to-NFS gateway on your own ARM SBC (I use an old Marvell SheevaPlug) and access all your NFS servers from DECnet.

Larry Baker
US Geological Survey
650-329-5608
baker at usgs.gov



> On 24 Jan 2018, at 3:53:39 PM, simh-request at trailing-edge.com wrote:
> 
> Message: 6
> Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2018 14:25:39 -0800
> From: Zane Healy <healyzh at avanthar.com <mailto:healyzh at avanthar.com>>
> To: Mark Pizzolato <Mark at infocomm.com <mailto:Mark at infocomm.com>>
> Cc: simh <simh at trailing-edge.com <mailto:simh at trailing-edge.com>>
> Subject: Re: [Simh] VAX Tape Emulation?
> Message-ID: <84E9BDEB-F78F-44B4-BC76-1773DB558687 at avanthar.com <mailto:84E9BDEB-F78F-44B4-BC76-1773DB558687 at avanthar.com>>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
> 
> 
>> On Jan 24, 2018, at 2:07 PM, Mark Pizzolato <Mark at infocomm.com <mailto:Mark at infocomm.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> On Wednesday, January 24, 2018 at 2:03 PM, Zane Healy wrote:
>>> What type/size of tapes does the VAX emulation support?  I was looking
>>> through the doc’s and it wasn’t obvious to me.  Is there a size limit?
>> 
>> How big is your disk?  :-)
>> 
>> Really, there is no actual limit on total tape size, since the data format is 
>> only concerned with tape records which are then processed sequentially.
> 
> And this is why I need to pay attention to when I ask questions.  So I can give all the details.
> 
> Here is the story.  I have two emulated VAXen, clustered with my Alpha.  My only physical tape drives are getting *old*, as are my tapes.  I’d like to backup to a simulated tape drive on the one emulated VAX.  The largest drive on my Alpha is 50GB.  I’d prefer not to have to span tapes. :-)
> 
> Zane

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