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<p>I've been bumping into a number of bugs in the Tops-20 DECnet
implementation, some worse (like crashing with an <font size="+1"><tt>ILMNRF</tt></font>
and trashing parts of files) than others (simple job hangs and
undocumented behavior. Fortunately, I have been able to fix most
of them; there's only one that I had to program around and another
that I have yet to investigate.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, I have a great deal of testing to do of the <font
size="+1"><tt>SETND2</tt></font> code. However, there are a
number problems doing that, besides those alluded to, above. For
a number of cases, I have to start from a fresh boot with the node
table completely empty. There is no command to 'empty' or reset
it. So that's a pain. Another thing you can't do is extract or
inspect the full node population.</p>
<p>It occurred to me that the data structures and associated node
management routines that I wrote for the decisioning logic in <font
size="+1"><tt>SETND2</tt></font> turn out to be fine for
simulating the <font size="+1"><tt>NODE%</tt></font> JSYS
itself. So what I do is fork an inferior version of <font
size="+1"><tt>SETND2</tt></font> and trap the <font size="+1"><tt>NODE%</tt></font>
with a <font size="+1"><tt>TFORK%</tt></font>. It's starting to
come together to the point where I need to model the actual rules
used for DECnet node syntax.</p>
<p>I know that a DECnet node can be a maximum of six characters long
with only the numerals <font size="+1"><tt>0</tt></font> (zero)
to <font size="+1"><tt>9</tt></font> (nine) and the letters A to
Z. However, I noticed some code in <font size="+1"><tt>COMND%</tt></font>
that checks to see that a node name has at least one alphabetic
character in it. I had never thought about that and was wondering
what the actual standard says (or where that standard is).</p>
<p>Does is matter where the letter is? In other words, are five
numeral zero's followed by the letter 'A' valid? Is '<font
size="+1"><tt>00000A</tt></font>' OK?</p>
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