Useful VAX Third Party Tools
While working on these VAXen, I have discovered several tools that have been extremely useful:
ODS2v2: This is a tool that allows you to read/write OpenVMS 7.3 disk images. This works nicely in my experiments, and the author quickly turned around a request to add a feature. These images can then be used in…
ZuluSCSI Blaster: This is a SCSI hard drive emulator that uses a (full size) SD card for its backing store. I literally just plop a VMS disk image in there with the proper file name convention and it shows up as a SCSI device in the VAX. (SCSI ID 6 is hard coded for the VAX SCSI controller.) You can create a file of
/dev/zeroof whatever length and then have VMS initialize it as a hard drive, too!USB Serial cables: These let me connect to the console port of the VAXen as
/dev/ttyUSB#. I use a bunch of gender changer, DB9/25 adapters and null modem adapters as necessary with them. This then lets me use…Antigravity CLI and Claude CLI: TUI tools to use LLMs to help do stuff on the VAXes. Very helpful. They can then connect to the VAXes with…
Telnet & Serial MCP server: An MCP server that lets Agy & Claude connect to my VAXen by serial port and Telnet. I’ve taken the original and enhanced it (with LLM help):
- Log all connections so you can review with the LLM does
- Extended to Serial & Telnet
- Maintain a persistent connection for back & forth, and work around the MCP 3 minute timeout