Well, that was fast!. I got a lot of mail on the question, all of it
good-sense stuff. I would loke to thank: Cathy Chandra, Robert M.
Lang,Alan at Nabeth, Ram Rao at Compaq, Jeffrey Hummel, Joe Fletcher,
Oisin McGuinness, Rick Hummers, Jesper Frank Nemholt, Chris Ruhnke, and
Dr. Thomas Blinn at Compaq.
First of all, it looks like there are a LOT of those old 3000-series
Alphas around, quietly doing their job. Even a guy at IBM said he had
one on his desktop.
The consensus of the answers is as follows:
The minimum configuration is Digital Unix 4.0d "for the Y2K support"
The overwhelming favorite was Digital Unix 4.0g which has all the
rolloup patches, and is "pretty stable"
The latest version supported for these machines is apparently 5.0
The lastest version that will run on these machines is T64 5.1, but it
is not supported. Cathy Chandra says her 3000/400 is running 40G of
storage on T64 5.1 with no problems except she had to change out a MoBo
chip ($1.42 NZ, she sez), probably on her kitchen table.
T64 5.1a is said not to run on the 3000/600 at all.
Dr. Blinn noted:
"You can run V5.0A on that system and claim it's supported. There
is no
official support for any DEC 3000 system in V5.1 and in V5.1A you
can
not install the software or update to it (that's blocking in
software).
If it were me, I would get to V4.0G and stay there. I would skip
over
V4.0F. It's possible to get there by updates, but you can't
readily
get the old media for, say, V2.0 and later up through V3.0G and
then
to V4.0A and V4.0D to get to V4.0G. So your best bet is either
to put
V4.0G on the system as a new install (being VERY careful to avoid
any
over-write of the data), and then configure the up-to-date
ArcInfo on
V4.0G. This avoids concerns about "does the third-party software
that
claims V4.0x support work on V5.x?"."
one concern in doing an upgrade is disk space. The stock hard drives
were a little over 1G. One good suggestion was to get a "snappier fast
narrow SCSI drive" (actually I plan to pack the box with cheap, fast
Seagates next time I get down to Window Rock) at least 3G capacity for
the upgrade.
Based on the information I think I will try to locate a 4.0g media set,
or find a download somewhere, rather than try to roll though a series of
upgrades. I was able to locate the original OSF1 license pack for this
box, so it may be possible to buy a boxed set of media through normal
channels.
Also I am leaning toward getting one of these machines myself. They
seem to just run, and run, and run
later
jn
Received on Sat Feb 23 2002 - 04:33:06 NZDT