Restoring an ancient 7012-320 with AIX 3.1

[Carlos Murillo]

Greetings everyone;

I have recently started to work on bringing up an old 7012-320H that I was given a few years ago. I have pinpointed part of the boot problems to the fact that the machine does not have an /etc/mount binary; the installed AIX version is 3.1 . Does anybody have by any chance an /etc/mount binary that you could share?

Regards,

Carlos Murillo.

[Lorenzo Mollicone]

are you installing from a graphics display or from a serial terminal?

[Carlos Murillo]

From a serial console; this machine is headless.

[Lorenzo Mollicone]

Do you have the original install media?

[Carlos Murillo]

No, and that's the problem. Originally it would not boot (it would post a 553 led message and stall), but I was able to get to the maintenance console using BOSboot diskettes that I downloaded from the net. The problem is, these diskettes are for AIX 3.2, not 3.1 like in the hard drive. I was careful not to run the 3.2 maintenance getrootfs script, which is documented to wreak havoc in a 3.1 installation, but still managed to mount the 3.1 filesystems in the 3.2 maintenance shell, and that's how I figured that the /etc/mount binary is missing. I also verified that the 3.1 binaries do not run under the 3.2 maintenance console, nor do the 3.2 maintenance console binaries run under the AIX 3.1 system. I was able to partially boot from the hard drive once I fixed /etc/security/passwd and /etc/inittab in the hard drive, except that only the /dev/hd4 (root) filesystem mounts; all the
other ones (/usr, /tmp, /u) don't mount because of the lack of /etc/mount .

I just need the /etc/mount binary to make this work, I think.

carlos.

[Lorenzo Mollicone]

On Tuesday, December 4, 2018 at 1:52:33 PM UTC-5, Carlos Murillo wrote:

I've got a 320 over here i've been meaning to restore. it had drives in it, but when it arrived, the drives were toast. what a pain in the ass machine this is -- in addition to it's desire for a speaker keyboard, it takes some nonsense cable adapter to create a serial port. I finally assembled all of the parts I thought I would need, only to find out the holes in the hard disk sled, they really only align with the old IBM drives.

I'm almost sure they dumped my IBM 2GB F/W drive stock when we moved warehouses, so I'm more than slightly annoyed.

I don't know what to tell you about your mount malfunction. I started my AIX journey about six months ago with a -39H, a machine much more forgiving than the -320 -- well, only as far as interfaces go, I did blow the fucker up once already)

I really only have less than basic knowledge of 4.3.3 and 5.1. Maybe I know a little bit more, but nothing of any kind of teachable degree. There doesn't seem to be many folks chatty on the forum, and I didn't want to leave you without a response.

but, are you in love with 3.1? the -320 should be able to run 4.3.3 I think.. attach a scsi cdrom to an open box, boot from the cd and lay a new AIX down..

I'll be around if you want to bounce ideas or whatever. OH, and if you do find 3.xx media, let me know !!

Thanks,
Lorenzo

[Carlos Murillo]

On Thursday, December 6, 2018 at 10:05:13 AM UTC-5, Lorenzo Mollicone wrote:

> I've got a 320 over here i've been meaning to restore. it had drives in it, but when it arrived, the drives were toast. what a pain in the ass machine this is -- in addition to it's desire for a speaker keyboard, it takes some nonsense cable adapter to create a serial port. I finally assembled all of the parts I thought I would need, only to find out the holes in the hard disk sled, they really only align with the old IBM drives.
>
> I'm almost sure they dumped my IBM 2GB F/W drive stock when we moved warehouses, so I'm more than slightly annoyed.
>
> I don't know what to tell you about your mount malfunction. I started my AIX journey about six months ago with a -39H, a machine much more forgiving than the -320 -- well, only as far as interfaces go, I did blow the fucker up once already)
>
> I really only have less than basic knowledge of 4.3.3 and 5.1. Maybe I know a little bit more, but nothing of any kind of teachable degree. There doesn't seem to be many folks chatty on the forum, and I didn't want to leave you without a response.
>
> but, are you in love with 3.1? the -320 should be able to run 4.3.3 I think.. attach a scsi cdrom to an open box, boot from the cd and lay a new AIX down..
>
> I'll be around if you want to bounce ideas or whatever. OH, and if you do find 3.xx media, let me know !!
>
> Thanks,
> Lorenzo

Thanks, Lorenzo. I have actually made good progress: I inspected the image of the hard drive, hoping to find an image of the deleted mount command. I did find it and scraped the binary off the hard drive image, and to my surprise, some of the strings in it were related to errors while _unmounting_ . This made me think that perhaps the mount binary was the same as the /etc/unmount binary, which was present, and on execution it changes its behavior according to its name. So I copied /etc/unmount to /etc/mount and voila' ! it worked! Now I am thinking about backing up what I have and make BOSboot diskettes from the current system. Afterwards, I need to understand /etc/migratepv to see if I can move this system to a larger hard drive.

The system comes with cc, c89, xlc (all dinosaurs) and cobol. It also has Qcalc, a text-based spreadsheet! I ran a few benchmarks (hanoi, whetstone, flops) and was surprised that it was somewhat faster than I expected; the flops benchmark tops 12 MFlops, for example.

I had experience from userland with AIX back in the 90's in the context of an SP2 Blue Gene cluster when I was a grad student, but it is only now (couple of weeks in my scarce spare time) that I have been learning the admin side, so it is all new to me. Very BSD-ish and weird.

I also thought about installing 4.3.3 (I have the media), but I wonder if a 320H with just 32MB RAM will be too sluggish under 4.3.3 ...

For the time being, I used the included /usr/bin/xmodem command to transfer some tarred files and got gkermit compiled and running to be able to better transfer source tar files and start building a better toolchain. It's been a long while since I transferred stuff using kermit at 9600 baud.

Carlos.

[Lorenzo Mollicone]

if you can get it networked, use ftp from a modern machine, that's how i've been moving files to and from the boxes here... great you're making progress !!

[Carlos Murillo]

On Thursday, December 6, 2018 at 1:57:17 PM UTC-5, Lorenzo Mollicone wrote:

> if you can get it networked, use ftp from a modern machine, that's how i've been moving files to and from the boxes here... great you're making progress !!

Unfortunately, it came without a LAN adapter. And, V3.1 does not have a SLIP or PPP driver, but I've heard that the SunOS 4.1.x SLIP driver implementation can be easily adapted, and I have the sources for that, so at some point in the future I'll give that a try. Imagine, having that machine connected at 115Kbaud....

I'll need to look at how to fix a non-IBM hd to that caddy...

carlos.

[Kevin Bowling]

On 12/6/18 9:51 AM, Carlos Murillo wrote:
> On Thursday, December 6, 2018 at 10:05:13 AM UTC-5, Lorenzo Mollicone wrote:
>
>> I've got a 320 over here i've been meaning to restore. it had drives in it, but when it arrived, the drives were toast. what a pain in the ass machine this is -- in addition to it's desire for a speaker keyboard, it takes some nonsense cable adapter to create a serial port. I finally assembled all of the parts I thought I would need, only to find out the holes in the hard disk sled, they really only align with the old IBM drives.
>>
>> I'm almost sure they dumped my IBM 2GB F/W drive stock when we moved warehouses, so I'm more than slightly annoyed.
>>
>> I don't know what to tell you about your mount malfunction. I started my AIX journey about six months ago with a -39H, a machine much more forgiving than the -320 -- well, only as far as interfaces go, I did blow the fucker up once already)
>>
>> I really only have less than basic knowledge of 4.3.3 and 5.1. Maybe I know a little bit more, but nothing of any kind of teachable degree. There doesn't seem to be many folks chatty on the forum, and I didn't want to leave you without a response.
>>
>> but, are you in love with 3.1? the -320 should be able to run 4.3.3 I think.. attach a scsi cdrom to an open box, boot from the cd and lay a new AIX down..
>>
>> I'll be around if you want to bounce ideas or whatever. OH, and if you do find 3.xx media, let me know !!
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Lorenzo
>
> Thanks, Lorenzo. I have actually made good progress: I inspected the image of the hard drive, hoping to find an image of the deleted mount command. I did find it and scraped the binary off the hard drive image, and to my surprise, some of the strings in it were related to errors while _unmounting_ . This made me think that perhaps the mount binary was the same as the /etc/unmount binary, which was present, and on execution it changes its behavior according to its name. So I copied /etc/unmount to /etc/mount and voila' ! it worked! Now I am thinking about backing up what I have and make BOSboot diskettes from the current system. Afterwards, I need to understand /etc/migratepv to see if I can move this system to a larger hard drive.

Does this old version of AIX have mksysb?

> The system comes with cc, c89, xlc (all dinosaurs) and cobol. It also has Qcalc, a text-based spreadsheet! I ran a few benchmarks (hanoi, whetstone, flops) and was surprised that it was somewhat faster than I expected; the flops benchmark tops 12 MFlops, for example.

Keep in mind that RIOS/POWER1 is a superscalar design and with execution
width that other architectures didn't match for quite a while. It's
possible to get 4 instructions per clock (a branch, a condition-register
instruction, a fixed-point instruction, and a floating-point
instruction) which could include a FMA (fused-multiply add) going on
this implementation.

> I had experience from userland with AIX back in the 90's in the context of an SP2 Blue Gene cluster when I was a grad student, but it is only now (couple of weeks in my scarce spare time) that I have been learning the admin side, so it is all new to me. Very BSD-ish and weird.
>
> I also thought about installing 4.3.3 (I have the media), but I wonder if a 320H with just 32MB RAM will be too sluggish under 4.3.3 ...

Yes that would be a bad time. AIX 3.2.5 would be best for that config.
Although 4.1 and 4.2 might be ok too but I don't have a lot of
experience with those.

Regards,
Kevin

[Carlos Murillo]

> Does this old version of AIX have mksysb?

-

> Keep in mind that RIOS/POWER1 is a superscalar design and with execution
> width that other architectures didn't match for quite a while. It's
> possible to get 4 instructions per clock (a branch, a condition-register
> instruction, a fixed-point instruction, and a floating-point
> instruction) which could include a FMA (fused-multiply add) going on
> this implementation.

-

> Yes that would be a bad time. AIX 3.2.5 would be best for that config.
> Although 4.1 and 4.2 might be ok too but I don't have a lot of
> experience with those.
> Regards,
> Kevin

Yes, there is mksysb. For the time being I added a second hard drive to the volume group and I've been trying to bootstrap a version of gcc, but several things seem to always get in the way. The included compiler can't build gnu make or binutils. The version of the included assembler has a bug that the gcc docs warn about and I did not find "fix PTF U403044 for APAR IX22829" at service.software.ibm.com .

I haven't found any install media for AIX 3.2.5 either.

Carlos.

[Michael Kraemer @ home]

Carlos Murillo wrote:

>
> Yes, there is mksysb.

AIX w/o mksysb is hard to imagine.

> The included compiler can't build gnu make or binutils.

Well, it's old.
Otoh, often enough, the culprit is not the compiler, but those braindead
configure scripts, which treat everything as "gcc".

There seems to be some AIX 3.1 stuff left over at

stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/system/rs_aix31

> I haven't found any install media for AIX 3.2.5 either.

No surprise here. It's IBM IP.
But quite a few folks have those in their closet.

But I'd stay with 3.1.
It's odd, but almost impossible to find these days.
3.2.5 is a good landing version for a 320.
I'd stay away from 4.x unless you have a lot of RAM.
If you have 4.3.3 media, a 43P-140 would be a good match.

[Lorenzo Mollicone]

i wonder if it was ever on cd... lol

[Kevin Bowling]

Speak of the devil, I just found 3.1.5 on 2 QIC cartridges in a
warehouse. Will image at some point. Would like to trade for 3.2.5,
4.1, 4.2 sets.

Regards,
Kevin

[Carlos Murillo]

On Monday, December 24, 2018 at 9:40:47 PM UTC-6, Kevin Bowling wrote:
> > But I'd stay with 3.1.
> > It's odd, but almost impossible to find these days.
> > 3.2.5 is a good landing version for a 320.
> > I'd stay away from 4.x unless you have a lot of RAM.
> > If you have 4.3.3 media, a 43P-140 would be a good match.
>
> Speak of the devil, I just found 3.1.5 on 2 QIC cartridges in a
> warehouse. Will image at some point. Would like to trade for 3.2.5,
> 4.1, 4.2 sets.
>
> Regards,
> Kevin

Unfortunately, I don't have any of the versions that you are looking for, but I'll keep an eye open for them. Please do share the images of the tapes when you make them.

carlos.

[Carlos Murillo]

I have been trying to bulid a toolchain in this machine, and finally succeeded in compiling gas, ld and so on in binutils 2.0.7 with the native compiler, but I still don't trust thus build entirely. The GCC docs warn about a bug in the 3.1.005 native assembler that requires the fix "AIX/6000 fix PTF U403044 for APAR IX22829", but I haven't found this at service.software.ibm.com . When I get back from the holidays I'll try to build gcc using the binutils that I compiled.

carlos.

[Jose Pina Coelho]

On Thursday, December 20, 2018 at 4:02:24 PM UTC, Lorenzo Mollicone wrote:
> [...]

> i wonder if it was ever on cd... lol

If I'm not mistaken, the support for AIX on CD came out with 3.2.5e or 3.2.5

[Lorenzo Mollicone]

Thanks Jose !

(do you have it? haha)

[Jose Pina Coelho]

Errr, no. They were eaten by a Grue.

[agustin.g...@gmail.com]

Nice Post!
Have some of you ever tried to install any Linux distribution on such a box?
Just wondering how fast (or slow) it runs (if it runs on...).

Thank you