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.

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On Tuesday, December 4, 2018 at 2:19:22 PM UTC-5, Lorenzo Mollicone wrote:

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

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.

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

From a serial console; this machine is headless.

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

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.

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

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On Tuesday, December 4, 2018 at 2:26:57 PM UTC-5, Carlos Murillo wrote:

On Tuesday, December 4, 2018 at 2:19:22 PM UTC-5, Lorenzo Mollicone wrote:

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

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.

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

From a serial console; this machine is headless.

Do you have the original install media?

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On Tuesday, December 4, 2018 at 5:23:14 PM UTC-5, Lorenzo Mollicone wrote:

On Tuesday, December 4, 2018 at 2:26:57 PM UTC-5, Carlos Murillo wrote:

On Tuesday, December 4, 2018 at 2:19:22 PM UTC-5, Lorenzo Mollicone wrote:

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

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.

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

From a serial console; this machine is headless.

Do you have the original install media?

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.

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

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.

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

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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.

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On Thursday, December 6, 2018 at 11:51:33 AM UTC-5, 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.

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.

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 !!

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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.

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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

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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.

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