[HECnet] Who's emulating?

[Mark Abene]

Serious?   Are you actually emulating a DMC11?   I'm intrigued...


Jason Stevens wrote:
I had a patch somewhere for SIMH to talk directly into hecnet..   So it'd
clear your first hurdle, although there isn't much I could do about the
2nd....

On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 5:23 PM, Mark Abene <phiber at phiber.com> wrote:

While I have been running three public access emulated systems for a few
years now (TOPS-20 on KLH10, RSTS/E v8 and 2.11BSD on SIMH), there are
several problems with me getting on HECnet.   First, my host server is
FreeBSD, and FreeBSD doesn't support multicast on tap network
interfaces, nor have I heard about any plans to.   Which means no DECnet.
At some point I plan to migrate my emulators over to a beefy linux
server, and linux does have the necessary support.   Second problem, is
that SIMH doesn't support any DDCMP-aware network devices, which means
that even if I solve the first problem (it'll allow me to get TOPS-20 on
DECnet), I don't have any way via SIMH to get DECnet/E working on my
RSTS system.   Call me crazy, but I just don't think I'll be paying 4,000
dollars for E11/linux.   So that's out.

-Mark


Marc Chametzky wrote:
The recent downtime thread has sparked much discussion about a variety
of DEC (and perhaps some Compaq) hardware, but who among us is living in
HECnet lives in software?

I have two systems nominally connected to HECnet, both emulated. I have
the SIMH VAX emulator running VMS (DUSTY) and I have Mark Crispin's
Panda system running TOPS-20 (CALHAN). Both of these are running as part
of virtual Unix systems (one Linux, one Solaris) on a single ESXi box.

I've also played with a couple Alpha emulators from Stromasys
(CHARON-AXP on Windows and CHARON-AXP NCE on Linux), but I've not set up
a more permanent virtual Alpha system.

I'd set up a virtual PDP-11 to play with as well, perhaps running
RSTS/E, but it's been far too long since I've used a PDP-11 to remember
how to set it up and maintain it. Same thing with VM/370 or z/VM on
Hercules. It's sad how much I've forgotten over the years.

--Marc