[HECnet] Multinet Tunnel Connections to SG1::

[Dave McGuire]

On 06/06/2012 08:59 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2012-06-07 02:10, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 06/06/2012 06:11 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
By the way, as a warning...
I seem to remember that DECnet support now have been dropped from Linux.
So it might not be in there anymore, if you look at recent versions.

    Huh?   Nope, works fine here, on a two-week-old Mint installation.
(Mint is Ubuntu with Canonical's bad decisions un-done)

Snip from 2.6-33 release notes:
====
commit f8b55f251012e104093e105483c45c5d85ad3040
Author: Christine Caulfield <christine.caulfield at googlemail.com>
Date:     Thu Feb 18 11:33:13 2010 +0000

      Orphan DECnet

      Due to lack of time, space, motivation, hardware and probably
expertise,
      I have reluctantly decided to orphan the DECnet code in the kernel.

      Judging by the deafening silence on the linux-decnet mailing list I
      suspect it's either not being used anyway, or the few people that are
      using it are happy with their older kernels.

      Signed-off-by: Christine Caulfield <christine.caulfield at googlemail.com>
      Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds at linux-foundation.org>
====

I guess the code might still be in there, but there is even less
guarantee (if such a thing is possible in an open source project) that
it works.

  Sure, but what I'm disagreeing with is the whole idea of something
becoming "unsupported" means it automatically stops working.

  At some point, there will be incompatible kernel changes (that's the
Linux way...the least stable APIs on the planet!) which will break it,
but that hasn't happened yet.

Chrissie is on HECnet, so she can expand more on the current status, I
guess.

  Excellent.   Hi!   We still want DECnet! 8-)

    I plan to contact the developers when I have a little time and offer
to do some more formalized testing against RSTS/E and RSX and get them
feedback, and possibly fix some of the issues.

    This really needs to happen.

Well, she is on HECnet, and is already reading this. However, since she
formally disowned it, it might be that there is actually noone you could
contact...

  Well, we'll either have to talk her into re-owning it (Hi Chrissie!
8-)) or someone else will have to take up its maintenance.   At least
eventually, when someone breaks the kernel networking APIs again.

                          -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA