Tom's MMT Pages

May 21, 2020

Setting up a VME based system to run VxWorks

I have on hand a MVME 167-33B board with VxWorks boot roms and a boot configuration programmed into an EEPROM which replaces the usual battery backed up NVRAM chip. Given the difficulty of changing the boot configuration, the plan is to set up the boot server to accomodate the existing configuration.

The server I plan to use currently has an IP address of 192.168.0.5, which places it on a non-routed subnet (which is fine). The VME board would like to boot from 128.196.100.19. Lucky for me, I have a set of notes on doing this here:

Setting up a linux system as a VxWorks boot server

To get a serial console, a USB to serial dongle, a long cable and the following command get the job done, at least for viewing output:

picocom -b 9600 /dev/ttyUSB0

It turns out that I had set up this server before for this, but some of the setup had gotten erased or overwritten by subsequent updates and such. I had to:

Add the route for 128.196.100
stop the iptables service to get my firewall out of the way
systemctl stop iptables.service
Put a .rhosts file in place for user tom (not strictly necessary)

After this, VxWorks boots up fine. I am having some problem with my USB to serial cable. I can see what the VxWorks system sends, but it does not see anything I type. After wasting some time trying to sort this out, I realize that I can just use the network and rlogin to the system.

Then I need to remember things. First is the w9h password for user tom. Next is the need to do the following in order to be able to load files and run ls:

iam "vwuser"

In general, user tom can't make his way through directory permissions, but vwuser can, although this depends on ownerships and permissions on ALL the diretories in the path to a file you want to load.

Setting up an x86 based system to run VxWorks

This involves finding a motherboard, case, and power supply with PCI slots. Then I will need to find an Intel 10/100 PCI ethernet card. Then a keyboard and monitor will be required. Then I can start configuration.

Do I really want to go through all of this? Can I simply use the existing mount computer for anything I want to test? For now I am not tackling this, nor do I intend to unless really forced into it.