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<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">You're quite right,
Tops-20 directory creation <i>is</i> a pain in the neck to the
modern user.</font></p>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">However, a Tops-20
directory is a <u>very</u> different beast than what you would
see in other operating systems. It was a different time with
different costs. Under DOS, Unix (all flavors), OS/2, Windows
and IBM z/OS (nee MVS) a directory is simply a place to put
files. So you say make me a directory and <i>poof</i>, you're
a directory.</font></p>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Under Tops-20,
directories have far richer semantics. First of all, they are
the store of record for login credentials, which is quite
different from all the above and Tops-10, as well. If you
create a directory--<i>anywhere</i>--and it is not FILES-ONLY
and it has a password, then you have just created a user.
Furthermore connecting to a directory is in no way like doing a
CD. Once you are connected, you have the same rights as the
owner and can use these rights to access files in other
directories that the owner has rights to. Group management is
superior to Unix in that a directory can both be in multiple
groups and provide multiple groups. It allows for far greater
granularity. Disk usage is carefully kept track of. However,
management of all of it requires special administrative
capabilities to be given.</font></p>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">All of this was
necessary in the days of machines have 10's of thousands of
users with strapped storage; I believe the default at Columbia
for undergraduates was 100 pages (about 350 KB) permanent
storage and 1,000 working. You've got to do things like that
when all you can squeeze into the machine room is a couple of
gigabytes worth of disk drives. The careful group management
was necessary to keep the more inquisitive students from
interfering with others' activities. We needed special programs
to manage all the accounts, the groups and the storage. Most
sites had home grown software like this and Columbia's was
pretty nifty.</font></p>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">The only thing lacking
was the ability for a user to create their own sub-directory. I
began looking at this by sketching out an IPCF% based client
server paradigm. The user would run a client to create the
directory and then the server would do all the automatic nice
things. It grew to be quite complex as it had to go recursive
to grab storage from superior directories' allocation and then
it would have had to interface into the group management system
to request groups for the user to access the subdirectories. I
gave up when the line was cancelled and we went to Sun SPARC.<br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Non-DEC versions of
Tops-20 (such as Stanford and PANDA) implement something called
super-domestic structures where the user can always access their
subdirectories. A limited version of relative directory naming
(viz, ./., ../) was implemented, also. Columbia's group
management software was intelligent and flexible enough that we
never needed to use the super-domestic code.<br>
</font></p>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Structure (and tape)
mounts are also a very different thing, but that's another
story.</font></p>
<p><font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Maybe I'll look at it
again after I finish my DAP changes and the new FTP server.</font><br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">
<hr width="100%" size="2">On 2/26/20 8:15 AM, Keith Halewood
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="color:#1F497D;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">I managed
to get the KLH10 emulator compiled and running the Panda
distribution of TOPS-20 under Raspbian on a Pi 4 without too
much trouble. Its ‘dpni20’ process has no trouble talking to
a TAP device which is bridged with eth0 and thence onto the
mixed in-memory/real-ethernet DECnet connection to the
HECnet. Admittedly, I’m not that familiar with TOPS-20 or
the ‘hardware’ on which it runs. My main interest was MDL at
the time. It’s still running as WALACH on the HECnet. My
main ‘take-away’ from the experience was: “HOW many
questions do I have to answer in order to create a directory
on this thing??”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="color:#1F497D;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="color:#1F497D;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">On the SIMH
side of things, I’m a bit stuck getting TOPS-10 running from
the DO scripts from the URL…. [I appear to have misplaced
this bit of information]<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="color:#1F497D;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="color:#1F497D;mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Keith<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="color:#1F497D;mso-fareast-language:EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<div>
<div style="border:none;border-top:solid #E1E1E1
1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0cm 0cm 0cm">
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">From:</span></b><span
lang="EN-US"> <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:owner-hecnet@Update.UU.SE">owner-hecnet@Update.UU.SE</a>
[<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="mailto:owner-hecnet@Update.UU.SE">mailto:owner-hecnet@Update.UU.SE</a>]
<b>On Behalf Of </b>Rob Jarratt<br>
<b>Sent:</b> 26 February 2020 11:51<br>
<b>To:</b> <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:hecnet@Update.UU.SE">hecnet@Update.UU.SE</a><br>
<b>Subject:</b> RE: [HECnet] Multinet alternatives ...<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
</div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-fareast-language:EN-US">I
can’t remember now what the problems were, but I think I had
problems getting Phase III running on SIMH with the KMC or
KDP (or whatever it was).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-fareast-language:EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<div style="border:none;border-left:solid blue 1.5pt;padding:0cm
0cm 0cm 4.0pt">
<div>
<div style="border:none;border-top:solid #E1E1E1
1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0cm 0cm 0cm">
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">From:</span></b><span
lang="EN-US"> <a
href="mailto:owner-hecnet@Update.UU.SE"
moz-do-not-send="true">
owner-hecnet@Update.UU.SE</a> <<a
href="mailto:owner-hecnet@Update.UU.SE"
moz-do-not-send="true">owner-hecnet@Update.UU.SE</a>>
<b>On Behalf Of </b>Thomas DeBellis<br>
<b>Sent:</b> 25 February 2020 20:14<br>
<b>To:</b> <a href="mailto:hecnet@Update.UU.SE"
moz-do-not-send="true">hecnet@Update.UU.SE</a><br>
<b>Subject:</b> Re: [HECnet] Multinet alternatives ...<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
</div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p>What issues had you encountered talking to Tops-20??<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>If you are using the SIMH emulator for a KS processor, then
the latest version of Tops-20 you can run is 4.2, which I
believe will do Phase III. Since there was never any
Ethernet adapter for the KS (it was a massbus device), I
believe you must speak DDCMP, which we used with KMC's,
which would do 56Kbs. There was a slower adaptor for
9.6Kbs, but the name escapes me at the moment.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>I've had little trouble with Tops-20 V7 DECnet; that is,
once I got it to working. When I was modifying FAL/DAP to
accept anonymous transfers, I and and others beat on it
quite a lot to wring the bugs out. These regression tests
were against another 20, RSX 11M+ (or whatever MIM:: is
running) and a couple of Vaxen. The operating system level
code was robust; no crashes.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>We found some interesting bugs; I think my favorite was RSX
wanting all capital letters for months and Tops-20 sending
capitalized months, so file dates got messed up. There were
others, but they took some effort to remediate; so, not so
favorite...<o:p></o:p></p>
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal">On 2/25/20 1:38 PM, Rob Jarratt wrote:<o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
<blockquote style="margin-top:5.0pt;margin-bottom:5.0pt">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Mine has been built
to be portable (it is in C). I have it running on
Windows, Debian and FreeBSD. I have not tried on VMS,
but I did do a partial port to VAXELN. I don’t foresee
great difficulties getting it to run on VMS. It looks
like I may have done some partial VMS work, but it has
been a while since I looked. I could look into
reviving/continuing that if there is interest.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="mso-fareast-language:EN-US"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Mine won’t talk to
TOPS10/20, yet. I started something on that too if I
remember correctly, I did build a DDCMP implementation
which I think partially worked. I think I foundered on
just getting DECnet running on TOPS20 on SIMH, I did
some work with Mark Pizzolato and Timothe Litt to build
a KDP emulation, but I struggled to keep up with them
and gave up in the end. I am not sure where that went.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="mso-fareast-language:EN-US"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="mso-fareast-language:EN-US">I need a bit of time
to work out what my status is I think as it has been a
while.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="mso-fareast-language:EN-US"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Regards</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="mso-fareast-language:EN-US"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="mso-fareast-language:EN-US">Rob</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span
style="mso-fareast-language:EN-US"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
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<div>
<div style="border:none;border-top:solid #E1E1E1
1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0cm 0cm 0cm">
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">From:</span></b><span
lang="EN-US"> <a
href="mailto:owner-hecnet@Update.UU.SE"
moz-do-not-send="true">
owner-hecnet@Update.UU.SE</a> <a
href="mailto:owner-hecnet@Update.UU.SE"
moz-do-not-send="true"><owner-hecnet@Update.UU.SE></a>
<b>On Behalf Of </b>Robert Armstrong<br>
<b>Sent:</b> 25 February 2020 14:42<br>
<b>To:</b> <a href="mailto:hecnet@Update.UU.SE"
moz-do-not-send="true">hecnet@Update.UU.SE</a><br>
<b>Subject:</b> [HECnet] Multinet alternatives ...</span><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</div>
<p class="MsoNormal"> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> What are the
alternatives for bridging DECnet systems across the
Internet that don’t require any special hardware and
can be self hosted on OpenVMS/VAX?</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> I’m aware of
Paul’s Python router, but I didn’t think it ran on a
VAX. Am I wrong about that? Is there a Python for
OpenVMS/VAX? I believe there’s a port for AXP but I
didn’t know about one for VAX.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> And I saw Rob
mentioned his user mode DECnet router. Same questions
– what environment does that require? And I saw
mention it being both Multinet and simh DDCMp
compatible – will it talk to a simh KS10/TOPS10/DMR ?</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Bob</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
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