[HECnet] Intermittent Connection with PyDECnet?

[Mark J. Blair]

> On Mar 2, 2020, at 10:26 AM, Robert Armstrong <bob at jfcl.com> wrote:
> 
>  You haven't said how you plan to connect on your end (or if you did, I
> missed it).

I may have forgotten to think that out loud. My preference would be to use PyDECnet for my upstream connection. I already run a *nix box as my local router and DNS server. I haven't used Multinet; from what I've read about it, it doesn't appeal to me much for my 2020 use cases. When I previously started looking into Cisco emulation in order to use it for GRE, it looked like a whole big learning curve of stuff that doesn't interest me in its own right, and which I'd rather avoid if I can.

>  And you'll have only one connection to me for all your machines.  Whatever
> you connect to me will serve as a DECnet router for the rest of your
> machines, and you'll have to set up some kind of local network at your
> location to interconnect all of them.

That's exactly what I'd prefer to do. One external router (ideally, a PyDECnet instance), with my local machines able to talk to each other on the local ethernet whether or not the PyDECnet instance is presently connected upstream. I'd probably also run a SIMH emulation or two on the same host that's running PyDECnet so I could have some usually-on VAX and/or PDP-11 presence on my home net even though the big space-heaters would be off most of the time.

> 
>  And the idea of a Ham radio AX.25 connection is cute but it's not
> realistic.  A) we're too far apart (I live in Silicon Valley) for anything
> other than an HF connection and that'd be agonizingly slow, b) can't really
> leave an HF transceiver running unattended all the time, and c) the
> legalities of using ham radio for Internet connections are tricky at best
> (the FCC doesn't allow amateur radio to be used for any commercial
> purposes).  Sorry.

No problem at all. It would be a a fun stunt to play around with if we were local to each other, but I had no illusions of it being practical.


-- 
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/