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

[Zane H. Healy]

At 7:54 PM -0400 6/23/08, Gregg Levine wrote:
Hello!
Is it me, or is this list suddenly acting like a night out in the
country? (Hint, I hear crickets, and I've not seen a post in months.)

This list tends to be long periods of nothing along with short bursts of traffic.

Okay now the Question: How would I go about configuring a PDP-11 (SimH
or E11) to talk to the HECNET? And which OS is prefrered?

Personally I'd look at E11, but then it has been so long since I played seriously with SIMH that the network support had just been added, and I believe it works pretty good now.   SIMH has the advantage of no limitations, but is likely to be the best bet, and it is faster.

As for an OS, I'd prefer to see you running RSTS/E, but I don't think that is what you mean! :^)   If I were to be serious for a second, I'd have to recommend RSX-11M or RSX-11M+, as their DECnet implementations are considerably less persnickety.   Additionally I don't think many people have managed to get DECnet/E running under either E11 or SIMH.   But then I had a hard enough time getting it running on real hardware.

I do not have a router or Cisco designed gizmo who's stable enough to
support the protocols that we are discussing here, however.

I'm guessing any old Pentium class would work here.   A 486 might not be able to push the data through Johnny's bridge fast enough.

I'm not sure that anyone is currently running a Cisco router you could connect to anyway.

		Zane

-- 
| Zane H. Healy                                       | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary)       | OpenVMS Enthusiast                 |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet)                     | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
|         Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing,       |
|                   PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum.                 |
|                               http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/                             |