Pete's Log: i has alphas
Entry #1549, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)(posted when I was 29 years old.)
I've done something silly.
Friday evening, I came across a post on Toytown. Somebody was giving away two AlphaServer 1200 systems for free. I was tempted to reply, but thought the entire idea too silly. But I kept thinking about it all night, and several hours later I decided just to send an email. Maybe I'd waited long enough that somebody else would have already claimed them.
Nope. They were mine. I just had to pick them up. So yesterday, I did that. And now I have two AlphaServers. With two external SCSI disk arrays. I don't know why. But sometimes you just gotta satisfy the inner geek.
I quickly realized that my lack of keyboard and monitor for these things might be problematic. I didn't want to buy a monitor at this point in time. But luckily, I found my wintel laptop has a serial port. So a serial console it would be. All I need is a serial cable.
I headed downtown to the Schillerstraße area, home to many computer and electronics stores. None of them had serial cables. Apparently some recent hack for a satellite receiver requires connecting to the receiver via a serial port. So there'd been a sudden rush. So (with permission) I borrowed a serial cable from work.
I let myself be convinced to go out last night, despite wanting to boot up my new beasties. So this morning came the moment of truth. Move the servers into position. Hook up power, ethernet, and serial cable.
Boot.
Serial port communication is not one of my strong suits, so I just had HyperTerminal connected on port COM1. All I got during the boot sequence was a few strange characters. Now what?
I decided to see if I could figure out a better terminal situation. I poke around a bit and decide to give telix a try. I had nearly decided to compile one of the unix solutions on my mac, before remembering the mac has no serial port.
Telix, on startup, sends various modem connect strings across the serial connection. That didn't seem to do much. So I was about to start looking for something else, but decided to try just typing "boot" into the terminal window. And it works! The front display still says "Power-up Failure," but I've got a running Tru64 OS!
Next steps: figure out how to configure networking in Tru64, decide if I want to register telix or find a better alternative, try booting up the second system... oh, and figure out just what in the hell I'm going to do with two Alphas.
P.S. Pete's Log turned 9 last Saturday!