Firmware doesn't load

I have a disk image with an OpenVMS 8.3 installation that works in PersonalAlpha (running in Windows XP guest on a Linux host).

I just took this file and plopped it into FreeAXP running on Vista. (The Vista machine is a Lenovo R400. CPU-Z reports the processor as "Intel Mobile Core 2 Duo T5670".) Booted it up, looks OK.

I go to log in as SYSTEM. It doesn't allow me to enter a password! Here's what happens exactly. At Username: I enter "system". The Password: prompt appears but immediately after that I get the following error message:

Password:
%%%%%%%%%%% OPCOM 25-AUG-2010 22:54:03.48 %%%%%%%%%%%
Message from user AUDIT$SERVER on ALF
Security alarm (SECURITY) and security audit (SECURITY) on ALF, system id: 1
Auditable event: Local interactive login failure
Event time: 25-AUG-2010 22:54:03.48
PID: 00000097
Process name: _OPA0:
Username: SYSTEM
Terminal name: OPA0:, _OPA0:
Posix UID: -2
Posix GID: -2 (%XFFFFFFFE)
Status: %LOGIN-F-INVPWD, invalid password

User authorization failure

There is no opportunity to enter the password - the error message appears immediately upon entering the username.

The same image file works fine (i.e., I can log in) under PersonalAlpha.

<hr>GEIN::SMITHFARM

< class='quote'>[b:]smithfarm wrote:[/b:]
Could it be that "localhost" is somehow hardcoded into the FreeAXP program itself?

Likely, not but then again, the Windows 'hosts' file could be corrupt.

What do you get for 'ping localhost' from the Windows command shell?

< class='quote'>[b:]smithfarm wrote:[/b:]
I go to log in as SYSTEM. It doesn't allow me to enter a password! Here's what happens exactly. At Username: I enter "system". The Password: prompt appears but immediately after that I get the following error message:...


Could Putty be configured in such a way, that it sends additional characters when you press the &lt;RETURN&gt; key ? Like an additional &lt;LF&gt; ? Which might be interpreted by LOGINOUT as a terminator for the pasword: read QIO ?

Volker.

I have seen the issue of not being able to enter the password under the conditions where running on an Windows XP VM on Virtualbox on a MacBook Pro.

As near as I could tell, something was incrementing the system clock at the same time that the login prompt was issued. As a result, the read timer for the log in expired.

Eventually the behavior stopped and I was able to log in. I have only seen this happen once.

The localhost is probably a parameter either in the FreeAXP configuration file or the pre-set putty configuration in the registry.

type %systemroot%&#92;system32&#92;drivers&#92;etc&#92;hosts | find "localhost"

You should see an entry for
127.0.0.1 localhost

You may also see an entry for
::1 localhost

And as stated in the previous comment, localhost should be pingable.


Now the reason that I run in VMs is that I have one VM with W7 and one with Ubuntu to have a FreeAXP/SimH VMScluster. Using the VMs allows me to have a private LAN connection between the two VMS systems for SCS and other network traffic. I can also NFS mount disks from the UBUNTU VM.

Too bad FreeAxp can not take direct advantage of the dedicated virtual NICs instead of putting them into promiscuous mode to try to share them. That might improve network speed.

Thanks again to all who replied. Great group of people here.

Just to summarize, the initial problem of the emulator not starting was due to PuTTY crashing immediately upon startup. The cause of this was simple: the entry "localhost 127.0.0.1" was missing from the Vista hosts file.

That problem solved, I booted (in FreeAXP build 283) a fresh OpenVMS 8.3 install from a PersonalAlpha container. Everything went peachily until the login prompt. I am able to enter a username but the system doesn't wait for me to enter a password and immediately displays an "invalid password" error, effectively locking me out of the system.

First I tried playing with the CF/LF settings in PuTTY but that didn't make any difference.

I strongly suspect the problem has something to do with CPU "timing issues" in the emulator itself. The FreeAXP release notes mention this:

"There is a known problem on AMD Athlon X2 systems that may cause various timing issues under FreeAXP. The problem is caused when the timestamp counters in each of the AMD CPU's drift apart over time since the last power-on.
"This drifting of the timestamps causes a higher timer-interrupt rate on the emulated Alpha. The fix is to install an updated processor driver from AMD that ties the Windows time routines to a single CPU core."

Interestingly enough, the system I'm having the problem on is Intel (Core 2 Duo), not AMD. I actually have an AMD Athlon X2 box here that runs Vista so I tried booting the same container on it. I can't say I was surprised when it worked fine: paradoxically then, in my case, the login problem is present on an Intel system but absent on an AMD Athlon X2 system!

Thinking it over so far, I have three ideas to try:

(1) restart Vista into safe mode - tried this already but the problem persisted.

(2) dispense with the PersonalAlpha container and do a fresh installation of OpenVMS from CD in FreeAXP - haven't tried yet.

(3) run FreeAXP in a Windows XP guest via VirtualBox - haven't tried yet.

If anyone has any other ideas on how to solve this login (timing) issue, or would like to make any other comments, that would be great.

For the time being, I'm switching back to PersonalAlpha, which appears to work quite well now that I've installed the idleloop software. I suspect FreeAXP is faster, though.

<hr>GEIN::SMITHFARM

Would you mind running CPU-Z on your system and posting the CPU information?

www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html