Tony Johnson has talked to Su Dong and the equipment is still needed to be active. The equipment needs to be moved as soon as possible as the equipment in the old network racks move to racks on a seismically retrofitted floor.
One possibility is to salvage slda7, move the active equipment to building 050 room 208, re-network and re-configure the hosts for the new subnet (probably in the 172.16-31.x.y private subnet area). The expertise in VMS is extremely limited at SLAC (possibly MCC or SSRL or Charley Granieri can assist), and these are very old hosts so how the equipment recovers from the move is unclear. SLACVX is a VAX station 4000 of early 1990's vintage which was kept since it was not known if SLD had any old programs that would only run on a VAX and not an alpha. If Tony Johnson can say that all old SLD programs will run on an Alpha, then slacvx can be junked and only slacax can be kept.
Building 50 room 208 is a user accessible area. In this room are two racks with a mixture of equipment such as scarecrow, GLAST servers, UPS' etc. There is sufficent space and, I believe, power and cooling for the active SLD equipment. The future of the room is unclear. The functions of the hosts in there is very diverse and possibly inappropriate. The floor has not been seismically retrofitted so presumably when the seismic retrofitting happens the equipment will need to move again. Another possibility is to move the equipment to the new network racks. This may be inappropriate since it implies SCCS is responsible for the equipment. Also it is not efficient in it use of space and power that may be needed for other projects.
Given the power and space concerns and the age of the equipment, other possibilities may need to be explored such as: replacing slacvx by the more modern slda7, or slacax, or maybe a PC based commercial VAX or alpha emulator running on Windows should be used. If it ran on a Dell 2950 the complete setup including disk space could sit in 2 rack units.
So the issues are were should this equipment move to, does it need to be accessible outside SLAC (can it be on a private subnet), who should take responsibility for moving the equipment, how the task should be resourced, what the future holds. These are all currently undecided. I can move slda7 to the salvage area, then perhaps John's people can take care of salvaging. Presumably, Tony with help from the Network folks can physically move slacax, slacvx, the storage units and the monitor/keyboard. Network engineering/architecture will decide on the new subnet address. Tony or somebody will need to worry about the reconfiguration etc.
The decision of where to move the equipment and how to fund the resources needed is more of a security and executive decision. Randy and Steffan have been briefed about this project, and it has been raised at the SCCS-EXEC meeting 9/8/08..