[HECnet] DECnet-10

[gerry77 at mail.com]

Hello all,

does anyone here has any experience running a TOPS-10 host with DECnet-10?

More than a year ago, we connected to our DECnet a KLH10 emulator running
TOPS-10 and its DECnet-10 software, but we had to shut it down just after some
days because it was causing us many troubles and had serious usability issues.

Now we would like to try again, so I'm writing here looking for some ideas.

We would prefer to use KLH10 instead of SIMH because of its quite interesting
multiprocess implementation which scales way better on the hosting system.
Moreover, the KLH10 emulator uses a very effective idling mechanism, by means
of a special device which has to be accessed by the guest OS in its idle loop.

Activation of both this idle mechanism (patching CLOCK1.MAC) and DECnet-10
requires a monitor rebuild, which should be almost easy because we have all
the sources and instructions, but which is actually not so straight-forward.

By reading manuals and Usenet posts, we found that we'd have to use the MONGEN
procedure to rebuild the monitor. So we patched CLOCK1.MAC and answered all
the relevant MONGEN questions about DECnet, but the final result was not good.
(Probably we ran NETGEN too, but at the moment we are not sure about this).

DECnet did start and we were able to make connections to and from the TOPS-10
host, but other parts of the system (e.g. BATCON) stopped working and, most of
all, there was absolutely no idling of the KLH10 host CPU.

We discovered that probably MONGEN only compiles some macro configuration
files and then relinks the monitor using a prebuilt TOPS10.REL, made up from
many macro files, including CLOCK1.MAC. So we need to entirely rebuild
TOPS10.REL from sources, but we do not know ho to do that.

The Software Installation Guide directs to Appendix B where it is suggested
that, for more information about building the monitor library file (i.e.
TOPS10.REL), we should read the batch control file COMPIL.CTL. Unfortunately
COMPIL.CTL does NOT contain any comment or explanation. We think it is
intended for somebody with a previous somewhat deep knowledge about such
tasks, which we do not actually have. we are using a quite standard
installation so common defaults should be fine, but there are anyway lots of
totally obscure files to customize (BUILDS.MIC, BUILDS.PTH, GEN.MIC, ...).

Any help, suggestion or pointer would be much appreciated!

G. (http://decnet.ipv7.net)