WB8TYW Projects and Hacks

In January 2025, I got the update to the OpenVMS 9.2-3 Community Edition. Actually I got two updates, there was a problem with the first update.   This article describes a script that I developed for quicky getting a new or updated disk image for the community edition installed on a KVM host to the point where you can control it from DECnet or SSH. It appears by default the VM will boot up with a DHCP assigned address with SSH enabled. So if you can force the DHCP assigned address, or can easily find out what it is, you can use that for automating the configuration. I want to avoid the password setting dialog, and I need DECnet IV for my home network, and I can not lookup a DHCP address easily to find the IP address. So first I will describe using the first OpenVMS 9.2-3 update which I used for debugging the script.  Then I will describe using it again for the second update. It turns out that my previous install using virt-install tool to create the OpenVMS 9.2-2 edition ...

 This is a write up of my setting up an OpenVMS 9.2-2 Community edition on Fedora/41. The community edition comes as a vmdk file for installation on Virtualbox.  To use on KVM it must be converted. Fortunately a user Marin has written a document on how to do this. https://forum.vmssoftware.com/viewtopic.php?t=9026 First step is to convert to a qcow2 image.  Different from the instructions, I will name qcow2 image based on community-flat in  my image storage area. First convert the image. qemu-img convert -O qcow2 community.vmdk community-flat.qcow2 Then I need to put the OS specific copy for libvirt to use. sudo mkdir -p /data/libvirt_pools/default/ sudo cp community-flat.qcow2 /data/libvirt_pools/default/robin.qcow2 First thing I discovered is that selinux needed to be put in permissive mode from the default.  This is apparently a bug in one of the kvm required packages that according to the internet reports was fixed in an earlier version of the package than I...