[HECnet] DECnet on KLH10

[Mark Abene]

Mike Shields wrote:
Mark -

I have a TOPS-20 setup on KLH10, running on a Solaris host wtih a dedicated
ethernet card for the KLH10 instance.

I'd try to help you but I honestly don't know how to configure DECnet on
TOPS-20. My goal is to get DECnet working,

At a minimum, you simply need to add the following to your system config
file (depending on your TOPS-20 version, SYSTEM:7-1-CONFIG.CMD or
similar)...

NODE MYNODE 1.123
ETHERNET 0 DECNET
DECNET ROUTER-ENDNODE

Replace "MYNODE" with your 6-letter nodename, and "1.123" with your node
number.   The "0" (zero) for ETHERNET may need to be adjusted if you have
more than one network interface, but "0" is correct for the first NI0
interface.   I'm fairly certain the third directive indicates that you're
an end node and are not effecting any DECnet routing yourself.

and one of the reasons I put a dedicated ethernet card in was that I read
DECnet changes the MAC address to some
specific value corresponding with the node number. For some reason I didn't
think that'd work very well with bridging/tap.
(Though it may work just fine, it was just a gut feel)

It works just fine actually.   Problem at least on FreeBSD is that the
bridge ceases to function if any of the bridged interface's MAC
addresses changes without simply cycling the bridge down and up again.
Because of this I disabled the MAC address change in KLH10 and do it
manually.


Well, anyways, let me know if you want to collaborate on getting both our
systems working.

Mike


I've actually made a new discovery... looking at "netstat -g", I'm
seeing that none of the multicast addresses exist that DECnet uses and
requires!   This would explain why I don't see any DECnet traffic at all.
I compiled KLH10's enaddr utility in an attempt to add the multicast
addresses manually, and I get failures for all attempts...
"SIOCADDMULTI failed - Can't assign requested address".   My server's
kernel wasn't built with multicast routing enabled, which is not a
default.   I'm wondering if this is the cause of the error.   I'm going to
do some further testing.

Regards
Mark