INFO-VAX Mon, 20 Oct 2008 Volume 2008 : Issue 566 Contents: Re: AlphaServer 1000a screen blanks after self test Re: AlphaServer 1000a screen blanks after self test Re: AlphaServer 1000a screen blanks after self test Re: AlphaServer 1000a screen blanks after self test Re: AlphaServer 1000a screen blanks after self test Re: Selective record extraction/copy? Using Fortran to generate graphics RE: Using Fortran to generate graphics Re: Using Fortran to generate graphics ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2008 11:24:33 -0700 (PDT) From: alexandre.laguejacques@gmail.com Subject: Re: AlphaServer 1000a screen blanks after self test Message-ID: On Oct 19, 1:11=A0pm, "Tom Linden" wrote: > Sorry, =A0ignore my posts I thought you had an XP1000 should have read mo= re > carefully. =A0No LEDs on a Digital box seems odd. =A0How about beep codes= ? Yes, odd that there are no LEDs but it seems that the "Operator Control Panel" LCD serves the same purpose... Ah, the beep codes... When it does a normal power cycle (as opposed to the far more numerous times when it refuses and just leaves the fans turning), it will emit 1 beep (yes, just one) during the SROM test. The service manual only lists beep codes in groups of three (e.g. 1-3-3 but never 1-0-0). ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2008 12:56:43 -0700 (PDT) From: johnwallace4@yahoo.co.uk Subject: Re: AlphaServer 1000a screen blanks after self test Message-ID: <10c31b02-6193-4103-ae68-25470a98f6be@d31g2000hsg.googlegroups.com> On Oct 19, 5:28 pm, alexandre.laguejacq...@gmail.com wrote: > On Oct 19, 7:40 am, H Vlems wrote: > > > A couple of questions about the system: > > What is the hardware configuration of the system? > > How much memory does it have? > > Is that amount shown on the console? > > Did you try to reseat each pci board and memory module ? > > Hans > > My initial message was misleading in the sense that I did not mention > that most of the time, the fans turn on but the front panel LCD does > not. This means that there is no diagnostic. Moreover, I only get > output to the monitor *if* the front panel has already given some sign > of life. Then, when it finally gets as far as output to the monitor, > everything goes black after a minute or two whilst the fans continue > to turn. Maybe this suggests that there is some poor contact > somewhere or a bad power supply perhaps? > > The configuration is fairly straight forward: > > pbxga-aa/an video card > > 0x 0 MB bank 3 > 4x 32 MB bank 2 > 4x 8 MB bank 1 > 4x 256 MB bank 0 > ECC bank not present on this motherboard > > The memory appears to be recognized (when I can get that far in the > boot console). There is one slot in bank 1 that has visibly suffered > some abuse but with some play, one manages to insert the SIMM. > Reseating the SIMMs has not helped. > > Right now I'm taking apart the machine piece by piece. I've turned it > on without the RAM and the CPU daughterboard. Still no output to the > front panel LCD. Perhaps I'm just making things worse! > > - Alex My vague recollection is that the LCD is driven by the main processor, there's no microcontroller or similar to drive the boot and diagnostic process, though some of the more upmarket Alphaservers do have this. Thus it's probably no great surprise that when the LCD doesn't do the expected thing, nothing else works further on than that. When you get something onscreen, what do you get? (I'd usually suggest using the serial console, except you're not getting that far... maybe disable the onboard VGA, *and* remove the PBXGA, as per User's Guide [1] Table 9-7?) You did say "The memory appears to be recognized (when I can get that far in the boot console)" - exactly what is leading you to think that? The Users Guide Chapter 6, Memory section, says that memory must be configured in groups of 5 SIMMs: "A minimum of one memory bank (five modules) is required.". This confirms my recollection that this system is intended to be used with ECC. Whether it will *work* (by any sensible definition of work) without ECC is a slightly different question, which others may be able to confirm if your Service Guide doesn't shed any light (especially anyone with real life AlphaServer 1000A experience). In your situation I'd be looking for a SIMM to match any one of the existing ones, and reduce it to one bank of five identical SIMMs as the next step, just to see what the system does when not semi- permanently stuck in a tight loop handling uncorrectable memory errors (which *might* be what it's doing at the moment). Don't forget that once you do get it live, you might want to check your firmware is reasonably recent. You are also supposed to run the relevant EISA config utility for VMS. This may be important even if you are not using any EISA cards, unless you are 100% confident you don't need any changes from the current EISA config; EISA config values can in principle change with firmware changes and OS changes, so it's good to be confident. Incorrect EISA config values can cause Bad Things to happen at inconvenient times. Good luck John [1] ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/alphaserver/firmware/retired_platforms/servers/AS1000A/EK-ALPSV-OG-A02.pdf ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2008 13:17:13 -0700 (PDT) From: johnwallace4@yahoo.co.uk Subject: Re: AlphaServer 1000a screen blanks after self test Message-ID: On Oct 19, 8:56 pm, johnwalla...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: > On Oct 19, 5:28 pm, alexandre.laguejacq...@gmail.com wrote: > > > > > On Oct 19, 7:40 am, H Vlems wrote: > > > > A couple of questions about the system: > > > What is the hardware configuration of the system? > > > How much memory does it have? > > > Is that amount shown on the console? > > > Did you try to reseat each pci board and memory module ? > > > Hans > > > My initial message was misleading in the sense that I did not mention > > that most of the time, the fans turn on but the front panel LCD does > > not. This means that there is no diagnostic. Moreover, I only get > > output to the monitor *if* the front panel has already given some sign > > of life. Then, when it finally gets as far as output to the monitor, > > everything goes black after a minute or two whilst the fans continue > > to turn. Maybe this suggests that there is some poor contact > > somewhere or a bad power supply perhaps? > > > The configuration is fairly straight forward: > > > pbxga-aa/an video card > > > 0x 0 MB bank 3 > > 4x 32 MB bank 2 > > 4x 8 MB bank 1 > > 4x 256 MB bank 0 > > ECC bank not present on this motherboard > > > The memory appears to be recognized (when I can get that far in the > > boot console). There is one slot in bank 1 that has visibly suffered > > some abuse but with some play, one manages to insert the SIMM. > > Reseating the SIMMs has not helped. > > > Right now I'm taking apart the machine piece by piece. I've turned it > > on without the RAM and the CPU daughterboard. Still no output to the > > front panel LCD. Perhaps I'm just making things worse! > > > - Alex > > My vague recollection is that the LCD is driven by the main processor, > there's no microcontroller or similar to drive the boot and diagnostic > process, though some of the more upmarket Alphaservers do have this. > Thus it's probably no great surprise that when the LCD doesn't do the > expected thing, nothing else works further on than that. When you get > something onscreen, what do you get? (I'd usually suggest using the > serial console, except you're not getting that far... maybe disable > the onboard VGA, *and* remove the PBXGA, as per User's Guide [1] Table > 9-7?) > > You did say "The memory appears to be recognized (when I can get that > far in the boot console)" - exactly what is leading you to think > that? > > The Users Guide Chapter 6, Memory section, says that memory must be > configured in groups of 5 SIMMs: "A minimum of one memory bank (five > modules) is required.". This confirms my recollection that this system > is intended to be used with ECC. Whether it will *work* (by any > sensible definition of work) without ECC is a slightly different > question, which others may be able to confirm if your Service Guide > doesn't shed any light (especially anyone with real life AlphaServer > 1000A experience). > > In your situation I'd be looking for a SIMM to match any one of the > existing ones, and reduce it to one bank of five identical SIMMs as > the next step, just to see what the system does when not semi- > permanently stuck in a tight loop handling uncorrectable memory errors > (which *might* be what it's doing at the moment). > > Don't forget that once you do get it live, you might want to check > your firmware is reasonably recent. You are also supposed to run the > relevant EISA config utility for VMS. This may be important even if > you are not using any EISA cards, unless you are 100% confident you > don't need any changes from the current EISA config; EISA config > values can in principle change with firmware changes and OS changes, > so it's good to be confident. Incorrect EISA config values can cause > Bad Things to happen at inconvenient times. > > Good luck > John > > [1]ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/alphaserver/firmware/retired_platforms/servers/A... Just in case it's not obvious: "I'd usually suggest using the serial console **for troubleshooting like this** (etc)" was what I was thinking, but was not quite what I tryped. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2008 23:19:37 GMT From: VAXman- @SendSpamHere.ORG Subject: Re: AlphaServer 1000a screen blanks after self test Message-ID: <00A815A8.175A32EC@SendSpamHere.ORG> In article <10c31b02-6193-4103-ae68-25470a98f6be@d31g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>, johnwallace4@yahoo.co.uk writes: >On Oct 19, 5:28 pm, alexandre.laguejacq...@gmail.com wrote: >> On Oct 19, 7:40 am, H Vlems wrote: >> >> > A couple of questions about the system: >> > What is the hardware configuration of the system? >> > How much memory does it have? >> > Is that amount shown on the console? >> > Did you try to reseat each pci board and memory module ? >> > Hans >> >> My initial message was misleading in the sense that I did not mention >> that most of the time, the fans turn on but the front panel LCD does >> not. This means that there is no diagnostic. Moreover, I only get >> output to the monitor *if* the front panel has already given some sign >> of life. Then, when it finally gets as far as output to the monitor, >> everything goes black after a minute or two whilst the fans continue >> to turn. Maybe this suggests that there is some poor contact >> somewhere or a bad power supply perhaps? >> >> The configuration is fairly straight forward: >> >> pbxga-aa/an video card >> >> 0x 0 MB bank 3 >> 4x 32 MB bank 2 >> 4x 8 MB bank 1 >> 4x 256 MB bank 0 >> ECC bank not present on this motherboard >> >> The memory appears to be recognized (when I can get that far in the >> boot console). There is one slot in bank 1 that has visibly suffered >> some abuse but with some play, one manages to insert the SIMM. >> Reseating the SIMMs has not helped. >> >> Right now I'm taking apart the machine piece by piece. I've turned it >> on without the RAM and the CPU daughterboard. Still no output to the >> front panel LCD. Perhaps I'm just making things worse! >> >> - Alex > > >My vague recollection is that the LCD is driven by the main processor, >there's no microcontroller or similar to drive the boot and diagnostic >process, though some of the more upmarket Alphaservers do have this. >Thus it's probably no great surprise that when the LCD doesn't do the >expected thing, nothing else works further on than that. When you get >something onscreen, what do you get? (I'd usually suggest using the >serial console, except you're not getting that far... maybe disable >the onboard VGA, *and* remove the PBXGA, as per User's Guide [1] Table >9-7?) It's been quite a while since I touched a 1000 but I believe that pulling the kbd and mouse would make it default to serial console. -- VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)COM ... pejorative statements of opinion are entitled to constitutional protection no matter how extreme, vituperous, or vigorously expressed they may be. (NJSC) Copr. 2008 Brian Schenkenberger. Publication of _this_ usenet article outside of usenet _must_ include its contents in its entirety including this copyright notice, disclaimer and quotations. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2008 20:16:50 -0400 From: JF Mezei Subject: Re: AlphaServer 1000a screen blanks after self test Message-ID: <48fbcf53$0$12377$c3e8da3@news.astraweb.com> VAXman- @SendSpamHere.ORG wrote: > It's been quite a while since I touched a 1000 but I believe that pulling > the kbd and mouse would make it default to serial console. And wouldn't the graphical display go blank during serial console bootup until decwindows was started and started sending billions and billions of colour pixels to it ? ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2008 20:09:16 -0700 (PDT) From: Hein RMS van den Heuvel Subject: Re: Selective record extraction/copy? Message-ID: <95986687-70a3-41cb-833f-5f133aaa4866@64g2000hsm.googlegroups.com> On Oct 19, 12:15=A0pm, "R.A.Omond" wrote: > gerr...@no.spam.mail.com wrote: > > Hello everyone, > Gerry> > how do I copy just some records from a non-indexed file to another one without having to resort to third party utilities like EXTRACT (1)? I just needed something like DUMP/BLOCKS or DUMP/RECORDS with binary output, OpenVMS simply does not have that as a utility. Too bad. It's trivial to write, for example by adapting the copyfile example from the RMS ref manual: http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/731FINAL/4523/4523pro_002.html#75_hll_example= ofcopyingfiles (need to copy rac, rfm, mrs instead of hardcoding, need to control record numbers to be written). A DCL loop is really the best OpenVMS natively can do for you. Roy> There's nothing intrinsically special about a "binary" file. =A0It's just > a bunch of records, for which any decent editor should have no trouble > dealing with. Fully agree. Yet there is NO editor that can edit for example an image shipped with OpenVMS. :-(. Lame. EDT can not handle record length > 255 TPU insists on "%TPU-E-FILECONVERTED, file format is being converted to a supported type". Since when are fixed length records no supported?! > For what it's worth, editing executable images is something I do quite > frequently. Super. Me too. But I just change values with tools like PATCH/ABS. Please explain which standard OpenVMS tools allow one to select records by number from a binary file? (other than dump). AWK & PERL (even with binmode) make a mess out of this as well. Hate to admit it, but this is a weak area in OpenVMS. Cheers, Hein. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2008 19:47:46 -0700 (PDT) From: PR Subject: Using Fortran to generate graphics Message-ID: <8d57e97c-ec61-4e51-a0aa-979880793924@f63g2000hsf.googlegroups.com> I was directed to an interesting task today. I need to process a very large dataset and create a series of graphics from them. The data set is oceanic environmental data and they want to see the data overlayed on sat shots of the ocean. Fun. :) Since the graphics do not have to be real time, I was thinking of doing it on a VMS system (IA64). I was wondering if anyone would care to share their thoughts on how doable this is, and on any graphics libraries available for Fortran 90. They grpahics need to be in some hi-res format, but at a minimum, a TIFF will do I suppose. The sat shots are coming in as TIFFs. There is no hurry on this, I have several weeks to propose the "how" and several months to actually "do." Thanks -Paul P.S. By "very large", I mean the data to overlay for each sat shot is just shy of a terabyte. -Paul ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2008 22:58:21 -0400 From: "Peter Weaver" Subject: RE: Using Fortran to generate graphics Message-ID: <8D8D17B83C94401E83B0ECE47FA3F78A@CHARONLAP> >... > doing it on a VMS system (IA64). I was wondering if anyone would care > to share their thoughts on how doable this is, and on any graphics > libraries available for Fortran 90. They grpahics need to be in some > hi-res format, but at a minimum, a TIFF will do I suppose. The sat > shots are coming in as TIFFs. >... Just a few days ago Helmut Michels announced in COV the release of version 9.4 of the data plotting software DISLIN. To quote Helmut (I usually like o trim my posts down, but this one deserves to be repeated in full); > Dear VMS users, > > I am pleased to announce version 9.4 of the data plotting software > DISLIN. > > DISLIN is a high-level and easy to use plotting library for > displaying data as curves, bar graphs, pie charts, 3D-colour plots, > surfaces, contours and maps. Several output formats are supported > such as X11, VGA, PostScript, PDF, CGM, WMF, HPGL, TIFF, GIF, PNG, > BMP and SVG. > > The software is available for the most C, Fortran 77 and Fortran 90/95 > compilers. Plotting extensions for the interpreting languages Perl, > Python and Java are also supported. > > DISLIN distributions and manuals in PDF, PostScript and HTML format > are available from the DISLIN home page > > http://www.dislin.de > > and via FTP from the server > > ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/grafik/dislin > > All DISLIN distributions are free for non-commercial use. Licenses > for commercial use are available from the site http://www.dislin.de. > > ------------------- > Helmut Michels > Max Planck Institute for > Solar System Research Phone: +49 5556 979-334 > Max-Planck-Str. 2 Fax : +49 5556 979-240 > D-37191 Katlenburg-Lindau Mail : michels@mps.mpg.de Peter Weaver www.weaverconsulting.ca www.openvmsvirtualization.com www.vaxvirtualization.com www.alphavirtualization.com Winner of the 2007 OpenVMS.org Readers' Choice Award for System Management/Performance ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2008 00:30:24 -0400 From: JF Mezei Subject: Re: Using Fortran to generate graphics Message-ID: <48fc0ac3$0$12416$c3e8da3@news.astraweb.com> PR wrote: > I was directed to an interesting task today. I need to process a very > large dataset and create a series of graphics from them. The data set > is oceanic environmental data and they want to see the data overlayed > on sat shots of the ocean. Is the output going on a display with interactive point and click, or going to a file as some static image file (.jpeg, .tiff etc) ? note that with VMS, any language can call routines from another language (with some caveats). If you create one image and wish to overlay it over another, there is imagemagik that is available on VMS. ------------------------------ End of INFO-VAX 2008.566 ************************