[HECnet] Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

John Wilson wilson at dbit.com
Fri May 17 16:18:02 PDT 2013


From: "Bob Armstrong" <bob at jfcl.com>

I thought I remembered that the Ethernet interfaces could do it, but how
does that work?

Sneakily.   It's in the DEUNA/DELUA manuals.   They DMA a small program into
memory, including the power fail vector (24/26 I think?) which points at
it, and then fake a power failure while blocking INIT L to themselves.
Obviously this is a ridiculous security risk (I guess they assumed the
ethernet coax was physically secure) so that's why MOP had a magic number
(which could be 0 in earlier versions but not in later revs).

The DEQNA/DELQA were kludgier and I'm drawing a blank on whether they even
support network-triggered booting.

The
DEUNA/DELUA/DEQNA/DELQA has no reason to implement DDCMP, although it
certainly had enough local CPU power to do so.   Did it still scan for MOP
trigger messages anyway?

DEUNA/DELUA support MOP dump/load/sysID (as well as ECT echo) in firmware,
I'm blanking on which parts of MOP the DELQA knows innately (I think at least
enough to send system IDs), and the DEQNA is too mindless to do anything
w/o driver help.

John Wilson
D Bit



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