From: Warren Toomey <wkt@henry.cs.adfa.oz.au>
Message-Id: <199802010747.SAA12606@henry.cs.adfa.oz.au>
Subject: Virtual PDP Tape - update
To: pups@minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au (PDP Unix Preservation)
Date: Sun, 1 Feb 1998 18:47:25 +1100 (EST)
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All,
	The virtual tape drive seems to be working fine. I've added RL
support, so you should be now able to install over a serial line to:

RP04, RP05 and RP06 disks.
RP03 disks.
RK05 disks.
RL01 and RL02 disks.

Other disk support would require hacking the V7 kernel sources.

I've back-ported uncompress to V7, and written a user-mode program to
read from the tape, so I'm hoping that once the basic root filesystem is
installed, you will be able to do:

	$ vtget /dev/tty1 5 | uncompress | tar vxf -

and pull over compressed tar images. That should speed things up.

I will consolidate the documentation, give it a damn good testing with
Ersatz 2.0 tomorrow, and then put the whole thing up for ftp at:

	ftp://minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au/PDP-11/Vtserver

I haven't heard from many of those who were `dying' for something like this
last year. Hopefully someone will find it useful :-)

Cheers,
	Warren