[HECnet] Alpha emulation?

[Marc Chametzky]

I decided to try looking at Charon-AXP NCE again and did have much better luck with it myself this time. I'm glad this topic came up.

then I mounted the OpenVMS Hobbyist
Alpha CD on the simulated CDROM and re-installed my own OpenVMS.

I ran into some strange problems with my Alpha CD. I was told that there were "bad blocks" found in the PCSI database during verification. The machine came up, so it appears to be okay, but I don't know that my installation completed successfully. I tried reimaging the CD I have into fresh ISOs, but they all come out the same. I wonder whether your version is somehow different from mine.

  Whenever I try any outgoing connection from the emulated Charon-AXP
system, I always get "network communication error" and "network partner
aborted logical link".   No outgoing connection seems to work; not SET HOST,
not FAL, not NCP, nothing.

It seems to be working fine for me in both directions.

One thing that I did that may be useful is that I preconfigured my eth1 interface with the expected (computed) hardware address for my DECnet address (I'm using 2.213 for my new system called ANDY). For my Ubuntu system, I have this file in /etc/network/interfaces:

  # This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
  # and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

  # The loopback network interface
  auto lo
  iface lo inet loopback

  # The primary network interface
  auto eth0
  iface eth0 inet dhcp

  # The trailing zone network interface
  auto eth1
  iface eth1 inet manual
  pre-up /sbin/ifconfig eth1 hw ether aa:00:04:00:d5:08

I don't know whether this is required, but I did see in the either in the log file or in the startup messages that Charon-AXP did seem to pay attention to the interface's hardware address. Maybe you should try that and see if that improves things.

--Marc