Thanks for the info, Ken. I'll make sure we have such a machine available. (01)
I have a question about the cloning process, and I'd appreciate help in
understanding the details. (02)
You talked about a clone/prune. Does the making the initial clone involve
cloning the entire TOPS-20 virtual environment on Doug's machine from
within Linux, or from within TOPS-20? I had understood that it wasn't
practical to start out initially with a clean PDP-10/TOPS-20 installation
and simply load a dump of the Augment directories into it, and that it
would be better to initially snapshot the entire TOPS-20 environment
and file system. Is that the case? (03)
As a point of reference, I'm not familiar with how the PDP-10/TOPS-20
environment lives under Linux, but in other systems I'm familiar with,
there is a very large file on the host file system for each volume of the
virtual file system. The virtual OS and virtual user files live in these
volumes. The emulator running on the host OS mounts the volume files,
and boots the virtual OS from a system volume. Is what I just described
the case here? (04)
If so, is the initial clone done by installing your PDP-10 emulator on a
new Linux system, copying all the volume files to the new Linux system,
then configuring the emulator to mount the volume files and boot from
the system volume? (I'm assuming that a "structure" is how one refers
to a disk volume under TOPS-20.) (05)
If all that is the case, then to ensure the privacy of Doug's files, it seems
like Rayleen would need to control the new Linux machine until she can
log in and remove all user accounts and personal files. To avoid having
stray blocks of deleted files at this point, it seems like we'd need to use
DUMPER with a full wild-card specification (<*>*.*.*) to create a virtual
tape for each volume. Are these virtual tapes what we would consider
a first snapshot of a "clean" Augment sytem, and how would we reload
them into a fresh PDP-10/TOPS-20 environment? It seems like this
assumes all the virtual files we need live on isolated TOPS-20 volumes.
Is this a valid assumption for Augment? (06)
Sorry for all the questions, but I really want to understand the process
of in detail so that I can explain it accurately to others. (07)
Thanks, (08)
At 11:49 PM 2/16/2005, Ken Harrenstien wrote:
> > When would you have some time to do the clone of Doug's
> > machine? If you could give me a couple of dates/times,
> > I can contact Raylene Pak about working with Doug to
> > expunge all but the guest account on the cloned system,
> > and contact Doug to see which time he'd prefer.
>
>We're in the middle of changing over to new hardware, so maybe wait a
>week for things to stabilize and then check again. All you really
>need is to get a good Linux box up on the net, accessible only via SSH
>(I can send you my ssh key), and I can download whatever Raylene
>generates, at my convenience.
>
>I should mention that your box really should have two ethernet NICs on
>it, both plugged into the same LAN, to compensate for brain damage on
>the part of the Linux networking code. Otherwise you can't telnet
>from the native system into the TOPS-20 running on the emulator.
>
>You'll also need to assign/reserve suitable static IP addresses and
>hostnames for the virtual TOPS-20(s) you want to run. DHCP won't do.
>
>--Ken (09)
Philip Gust
Nouveau Systems, Inc. (010)
phone: +1 650 961-7992
fax: +1 508 526-8142 (011)
mailto: gust@NouveauSystems.com (012)
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