[HECnet] DECnet session control specification

[gerry77 at mail.com]

On Wed, 6 Jan 2010 11:50:05 -0500, you wrote:

"Reserved" means "send zero, ignore on receipt".   It most definitely
does NOT mean "check on receive that this is zero", that's a silly
mistake all too often make in protocol design.   This too is for mixed
version handling.   If a new flag can safely be ignored by an older
system, then the newer system can simply send that flag in what used to
be a reserved field, and the right thing happens.

Sure, but I'm not trying to implement something nor to make different DECnet
versions cooperate. I'm just studying the actual content of some packets and
have noticed some discrepancies between the standard specifications and the
actual data on wire, sent from a VMS V7.2 box to another V7.2 system. :-)

Finally, proxy was originally a VMS specific enhancement and was adopted
in some other implementations (I know DECnet/E picked it up, at least in
a semi-compatible form).   I'm not sure that it was ever specified in an
architecture spec.

See above. What I'm looking at is the data exchange between two VMS boxes,
both at V7.2, so it's not strange to see something about proxies.

Speaking about specifications, I was thinking that DEC was quite strict
about this and I was hoping that somewhere there was at least an update if
not an entire new specification, or that someone would know who to ask for.

BTW, all the differences I've found are in the session control protocol and
the one about proxies is just one of them: another is in the contents of the
format 2 "destination end user name".

Thanks,
G.