Fwd: Finally- gratification!

[Robert Repko]

I received the following from John Esak and he asked me to forward it to the list to thank everyone that offered suggestions in his endeavor to install SCO 5.0.7 on a Dell T7400 so he could install filePro on it.

Begin forwarded message:

From: "john at timescape.com" <john at timescape.com>
Date: September 20, 2020 at 1:13:09 AM EDT
To: Robert Repko <rtr at rsquared.com>
Cc: Jason Garner <jason.garner at evalsvs.com>
Subject: Finally- gratification!


Bob, would you mind forwarding this note to the list for me… thanks.

Bob,
I’m writing to you first, to thank you for your suggestions and tremendous help over the Dell OSR 5.07 install.  Without your aid, and that of Tom Podnar, as well as *all* the bits of help from every other person who answered my call for input on this difficult old topic… we never would have managed it.
Today, was different than the other few times we tried throwing everything we had at the server… including  the kitchen sink… for this time, it began to respond more affably.  From the first defbootstr attempt, it appeared that we were getting closer and closer rather than farther and farther away.
There was no one thing that clicked it all into place, but honest to God - *every* suggestion all together finally cracked the damn thing.
As I mentioned in the first note, I thought the driver was LSIL and could see the onboard HBA was SAS6 and so forth, but getting confirmation from Tom that this controller was under the LSIL driver gave us faith to not keep changing that around.  One of the things we did was change the CMOS settings back to ATA foregoing AHCI and then even using the idea to turn off the USB controller temporarily… each tip  got us closer and closer.  In a last ditch effort, Jason and I finally changed the syntax I was using with every attempt.  In many places, the examples show the selection of the host controller, bus, ID, and LUN as (0,0,0,0) four positions.
For example my CDROM  was on ID 2, so I kept putting (0,0,2,0) and the hard drive at 3, etc. Just on a hunch, since some of the talk on the controller was showing just 3 placeholders, I removed the first 0 and used Srom=lsil(0,2,0) foregoing the”HA position)  and just used BUS,ID, LUN) and Good God!  It worked.  Like I say, it was the huge struggle everyone remembers, but with a little perseverance and Jason’s patience, we nailed the right combination of variables…. And happily this month *has* an “r” in it… so it all actually fell  into lace and we did a perfect error-free install.
I just wanted to thank everyone who answered the call for help from this list.  The FP list  *still* has the great benefit of bringing the hard won experiential knowledge of so many talented people together into one place.  Sure, it is like many of the other forums and mailing lists out there, but as we all know, this one has had at its center some obscure areas of concern, like FilePro, SCO, shell scripting and the odd quirks of lots of the hardware that has grown up through these decades surrounding thisarea.
I’m so glad you wall were there…. You validated hours and hours of work that were seeming to have no satisfactory ending in sight.
(Just as an aside that will make you all chuckle, I actually reads this to Jason when I came across it in the 100’s of articles and pages I read out on the net regarding this topic... the gentleman was talking about loading 5.07 onto a Dell T7400 *exactly* what I was working at… After stating lots of good ideas, he finally said, “… but if you are actually trying to load SCO 5.07 onto a DELL T7400… I’m afraid it won’t happen… you are out of luck!”  ��  Happily, I take things like this as a direct challenge to my nerd/technical manhood, and thought to myself, it’s time to ask the group out on the FP mailing list!   So, we had two things going for us that he didn’t… a bulldog tenacity, and this mailing list with its helpful people.
As  things calm down for me in the next couple months (hopefully) I will be able to re-start up my membership and consequent scanning/contribution to this mailing list once again.

Take care all,

John

P.S. Once this machine is fully loaded and stable, I will purchase Microlite BackupEDGE for it, and start to unpack and restore to various file systems all the incarnations of my *nix machines… which I have been saving for posterity… when  he comes around.  I think he is finally near now after all.
In those Master backups, I also have the various and many Windows machines that I’ve used since about 1985 or so.  I’ve always wanted to look through that stuff and do it in a leisurely way. Maybe it will actually happen now.

BTW, on this DELL server I loaded the 5.07 onto a 128Gb SSD and will add a secondary (rotational)) multi-terabyte drive for everything else, including backups. I was commenting to Jason that the 128Gb SSD cost only $18 from Amazon, and I ordered it in the morning, and it got here this afternoon just hours later on the same day!  So, it’s not just memory and storage that has gone into the outer limits of our imagination… our whole life experience is now transacted in the stratosphere.  To our grandkids, who may be reading this note a couple decades from now…. And who have quantum computers embedded in their fingernails, this will seem like a very funny note from prehistory…  ��  In the meantime, for now, I just enjoy being able to hang on (by those same somewhat older fingertips) as best I can. �� Thanks again to all of you.
 John Esak

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