[HECnet] SIMH VAX Project

[Kari Uusim ki]

On 30.6.2011 17:51, Mark Benson wrote:
On 30 Jun 2011, at 14:40, Johnny Billquist<bqt at softjar.se>   wrote:

. However, most people just find it overly complex to manage compared to DECnet IV, without any tangible benefits.

I will need to look at reconfiguring my Alpha I think. Contemplating changing the disks around in it anyway so might try and get it right on re-install.

You do as you please, of course. I think Johnny is somewhat exaggerating about the DECnet-plus management. It is not _that_ difficult to handle. Many others claim that it is too complex, but IMHO the point is that the design and philosophy is different from DECnet Phase IV.
It's like having a box camera and a system camera; you can take pictures with both, but when you want to fine tune your pictures or take pictures in other conditions than in sunshine you need a system camera.
You have a much better and accurate control of what's happening within your DECnet stack in every layer. In the integrated implementation you have OSI as well right out-of-the-box. I've never seen another OSI implementation which has such a detailed and comprehesive management. It is a masterpiece. No wonder it was used in really big companies. DEC used it in its worldwide internal network (called the Easynet), of course. And it worked like a charm.
In fact the Phase IV was way too limited for bigger networks. In many companies there were needed to do tricks to get all needed nodes attached to the network. After Phase V was implemented, all limitations were gone.
Then came TCP/IP and mixed up everything, but that's another story. :)

Why not play around with DECnet-plus when you already have it installed and working?


As for the "problems" with NetBSD, I think I saw that you figured out that simh needs to be run as root for it to work. That should be pretty obvious, since it would be a big security problem if everyone was allowed to sniff the ethernet cables at will. Also, it is "ra0" and not "/dev/ra0". Ethernet device names are not paths that exist in the file system. It should be obvious if you actually do an ls on /dev... There isn't any /dev/ra0 (well, unless you happen to run a VAX with NetBSD, in which case ther
e would be a /dev/ra0[a-h] for a disk drive.

NetBSD's /dev is very confusing - a whole lot of nodes exist for hardware that isn't there (as far as I can see).

I was clutching at straws. :)

Yes, both simh and the machine itself can share the same ethernet port, with the possible problem of talking between those two entities. But from other machines, there will not be any problems (this is not an aspect of the pcap library, but actually a thing related to the Berkley packet filter (bpf) which pcap use, and also to the underlying ethernet driver and possibly the hardware itself).

However, there is in general a bigger problem with simh, NetBSD and DECnet, in that DECnet expects to be able to change the MAC address of the ethernet interface

SIMH uses a separate MAC address that is specified in the bootstrap configuration. I'd imagine (I don't know for sure) that DECNet's MAC control would alter this value, not require altering the hardware embedded MAC of the NIC. The two instances appear to outside Ethernet devices as separate entities as far as I can tell.

As for compiling, yes, the pcap library have to be around already at compile time, or the compilation will fail (obviously). Not withstanding shared libraries and all that, the header files, which are also installed along with the pcap library itself, are needed for compilation. And at link time, the library is checked for some information at that time also. That said, libpcap is a standard component of NetBSD, and there is no need to install another version from pkgsrc.

It may have pulled it in as a dependancy via pkgsrc. I know it compiled and installed 4 packages.

Well, not really. Linux and Unix are written by different people, but they are based on the same basic design. VMS and WNT was designed by the same person, but not designed in the same way.

Anyone using one Unix system will feel pretty much at home with any other Unix system. Yes, some details differs, but almost everything will be the same, down to using the same shell, similary file system layout, and so on... Try that between VMS and WNT if you dare... :-)

It was only a joke. ;) ;)

I hostnamed my new Windows PC 'cutler' - I needed a name and as it's running a spiritual successor of NT I thought it was appropriate ;)