[HECnet] Quiet list and a question about setting up a system

[Christine Caulfield]

Johnny Billquist wrote:
Christine Caulfield wrote:
Zane H. Healy wrote:
At 12:03 AM +0200 6/25/08, Johnny Billquist wrote:
Bob Armstrong wrote:
  I have one machine running Ubuntu w/DECnet here and haven't had any
problems, but my machine is just an end node.
Don't try to talk with anything but VMS, though... ;-)

  Does the DECnet/Linux just not implement RTERM?   Or are there deeper
problems?

Don't know. But they do implement CTERM. But it only works against VMS. Same for NFT and PHONE.
The implementors have only had VMS systems to test against, to their defence. And I think it might be a piece of reverse engineering on their part as well.

I'm pretty sure I was able to connect to my RSX-11M 4.2 system back nearly 10 years ago using DECnet/Linux.   As I recall it didn't work the best, but at least I was able to log in and do some stuff.


It's worth knowing that DECnet for linux has two 'set host' programs. sethost is an old one written by Eduardo and (I think) has some rterm code in it. It only supports a small subset of the protocols though so things like line and screen editting (on VMS) just don't work.

I rewrote dnlogin from scratch fairly recently (well, in the last couple of years or so!) and though it's only really been tested to VMS it's a LOT better than sethost. It only does CTERM though.
Sounds like the situation might be better now then.
Maybe someone could try?
As for the problems with DECnet between Linux and RSX I should point at that it's been applications that I've had problems with. The basic DEcnet protocol implementation as such is, as far as I know, working fine.

Oh, I'm sure that's true. As you say, they've only really been tested against VMS as that's what I had available at the time. OK I now have access to other systems via HECnet but I don't have the time to do anything about it ... that's just life, sorry.

I do take patches though ;-)


-- 

Chrissie