[HECnet] Hecnet and DDCMP

[Mark Abene]

Jarrat mentioned his simulated DMC11 for SIMH allowed him to connect a
friend to HECnet.   This is all I'm after for my SIMH RSTS/E v8 setup,
since it currently has no other connectivity options.   With a
simulated DMC11 I would be able to connect it to HECnet and give a lot
more people access to it.

-Mark

On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 4:18 PM,   <Paul_Koning at dell.com> wrote:
DMC-11 speaks DDCMP V3.1 (give or take some bugs in the "high speed" version).   But that's sync only.   Depending on what you want to talk to, a DMC (or its relatives DMR-11, DMP-11, or DMV-11) may not help; if the other end speaks DDCMP over an async link (UART) then it won't work because the character framing doesn't match.

That said, I wonder what it means to emulate a DMC-11.   You could have it speak DDCMP over a UART, or something else entirely.   If the former it would talk to another DDCMP node; if the latter it would not but it would still work for tying one emulated DMC-11 to another.

If you want DDCMP, one approach is to get a copy of the spec, and implement what it says.   That works; it is how I implemented DDCMP support for RSTS V10 (based on an earlier version based on V9.6).   The protocol is quite simple and the spec is well enough written that, if you do what it says, the result WILL interoperate with hardware such as the DMR-11.   The only tricky one is the DMC-11 because it has some undocumented bugs;   the main one I remember is that the high speed version can't handle back to back packets.   I wish I could contribute the code   I wrote but I can't, for various reasons one of them is that it's a RSTS device driver and written in 100% assembly language.

It would not be hard to do a version for other platforms; I once looked at a Linux terminal protocol handler (forgot what that is called) that could hook into DECnet/Linux.   Didn't get far enough on that, though.

           paul

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Mark Abene
Sent: Sunday, January 01, 2012 6:06 PM
To: hecnet at update.uu.se
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Hecnet and DDCMP

Jarratt, did you make this publicly available on the SIMH list?   It would be great to have a DMC11 device emulated, since I insist on running RSTS/E v8 (for historical reasons... it was the last real RSTS before "the pollution").   RSTS/E v8 doesn't have ethernet support, so the only way I could have DECnet is via a (previously unemulated)
DMC11 interface.   Does yours work well?

-Mark

On Sun, Jan 1, 2012 at 3:23 AM, Jarratt RMA <robert.jarratt at ntlworld.com> wrote:
Working with a friend, I  have written a SIMH emulation of the DMC11
device, so you can do this with SIMH. It tunnels the bytes sent
to/from the device over a socket. We have used the SIMH emulation to
connect my friend to HECnet over a (simulated) DMC11.

The bit I am not entirely sure about is to what extent this is using
DDCMP as I don't have a full understanding of DDCMP.

Regards

Rob
On 31 December 2011 18:46, The Presence <tpresence at hotmail.com> wrote:

Hey guys,

Has anyone worked out a mechanism to connect a node to hecnet using DDCMP?
  Perhaps some tunneling technology over IP, or virtualized serial?

Kevin