[HECnet] DECnet VMS <-> RSTS/E

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2012-10-29 15:01, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:

On Oct 29, 2012, at 3:26 AM, Jordi Guillaumes i Pons wrote:



Jordi Guillaumes i Pons
Barcelona - Catalunya - Europa

El 29/10/2012, a les 8:07, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> va escriure:
Going from RSTS/E to VMS via "SET HOST 61.2" gives me this:

---------------------------------------------
$ set host 61.2
Connection Established to VAX/VMS Node 61.2

?Unsupported Virtual Terminal Protocol.

I don't think you can use RTERM as an incoming protocol. And since you can't use it outgoing (from the Alpha) I guess it has been removed from Alpha VMS too...

There are two generations of terminal protocol (not counting LAT).   The newer of the two is Cterm, which is very large and very complicated.   VMS supports it, RSTS doesn't.   (I forgot if RSX does.)

RSX do. But there are issues, but mostly it works well enough to be at least usable...

The earlier one doesn't have a name as far as I remember.   Also, it isn't one protocol; instead, it's a separate protocol for each destination OS type.   The VMS and RSX flavors roughly correspond to the terminal QIO operations, you could think of them as a sort of RPC.   The RSTS one is a bit like telnet in that it comes with a simple line mode and a raw character mode.   The TOPS-20 one is just raw character mode.   All of these use the same DECnet object number, the distinction between the different protocols is made when you connect.

Right. The RSX flavor is rather weird in that the I/O is done locally as whole I/O operations. Comparing it with RPC is probably a good way to explain it, as far as I can tell.

RSX have separate application for connecting to RSTS/E (RRS), TOPS-20 (HOST) and RSX (RMT), but they are all in the "unsupported tasks" category.

Also, the application installed on RSTS by default for Set Host ("net") is the RSTS-only subject of the older protocol.   The message you see comes from that application.   You need to install the "unsupported" multi-OS version ("netuns").   With that in place, it should be able to talk to any OS.

If VMS didn't have the older protocol listener in place, you'd get a different error message: a failure to connect due to the DECnet object not being defined at the destination.

"Unknown object" or something similar, I would think.

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                                   || "I'm on a bus
                                                                  ||   on a psychedelic trip
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