Norsk Data notes

A page where User:Stian takes down his initial learnings from playing with his new toy, a Norsk Data ND-5400 ES.

Bootloader

The ND bootloader is called OPCOM. When you turn on the machine you're presented with a '#' prompt on the terminal, this is the OPCOM prompt. The next steps usually are:

#MACL
##&

'MACL' reloads microcode, resets CPU and bus, you apparently should always do this before anything else. When it's done it prints an extra prompt so you have two prompts, and the '&' means to load the default boot device.

There are other interesting incantations in the OPCOM, more on that later.

SINTRAN boot process

I've been trying to get a grip on the boot process (seems like a natural place to start), so far the extent of my discoveries is that the files HENT-MODE and LOAD-MODE are the equivalents of rc scripts, where the former is loaded from a "cold start" and the latter I think for both a cold and warm start, but the distinction isn't all clear to me yet. There's loads of overlap in the two files on my system, and I'm pretty sure both are executed on a cold start, which seems odd.

There doesn't seem to exist an automated way to do clean shutdowns, so it's basically a long list of tasks to do manually -- more on that later.

Networking

My ND has two Ethernet cards, I believe it's one 'Ethernet II' module and one 'Ethernet III' module, but I've yet to find out which is which physically. TCP/IP is supported, and this support might be called OpenLAN, underneath or alongside which exists ND's own networking protocols and tools which are called COSMOS.