[HECnet] Looking for systems to test against...

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

On Apr 23, 2014, at 3:36 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

On 2014-04-23 21:31, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:

On Apr 23, 2014, at 3:16 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

...
Indeed, the quota was the problem. Works now. Excellent! Cool. However, RSTS/E did not present the kind of attributes on text files that I would have thought.

Native RSTS files don   t *have* attributes, no more than Unix files do.   FAL supplies something if you don   t specifically ask for a transfer mode, and that something is probably a safe but unhelpful default like undefined records, 512 block size.

Right. I just sortof expected DAP to say that they were stream files, or something like that.
But on the other hand, that could possibly be messy if the file actually was some binary thing, so maybe unknown makes more sense after all.

Yes, that   s why it is done that way.


If you ask for text mode, FAL will handle that, and supply something more helpful.   Either stream_crlf, or it will convert to a more popular RMS format, I don   t remember.

It obviously do work right if you ask for ASCII. I wonder which end do the conversion in that case. Is the sending side aware that the file should be sent as some kind of ASCII text file?

Quoting the DAP 5.6.0 spec, Attributes message:

        DATATYPE(EX-2) : BM = The type of data   being   transferred.     The
                                                    default     is   Image.     Unless   a   file   has
                                                    attributes   specifying   whether   the     file
                                                    contains   ASCII   or   Image   data, the value
                                                    (ASCII or   Image)   sent   by   the   accessing
                                                    process when opening a file, is returned by
                                                    the accessed process.

                                                    Bit         Meaning (When Set)

                                                      0           ASCII (see Note 1).
                                                      1           IMAGE (default) (see Note 2 below).
                                                      2           EBCDIC (Reserved).
                                                      3           Compressed format. ...

Note that it says the default is Image, which is another reason why RSTS FAL defaults as it does.   And the    setting up the link    section says that after opening the connection, an Attributes message is sent by the accessing system    specifying the mode and format of the data   , followed by an access message to specify the operation.

So NFT says what it wants, FAL replies that it will comply, and FAL sends the data in the requested form.


RSX and VMS don   t have this because all files are RMS files.

Well, technically, in RSX you can have either an RMS-11 DAP, or an FCS-11 DAP. But since RMS is pretty much a superset of FCS it's more of a technicality than a real point. :-)

What I should have said is that on RMS and VMS, all files have RMS style attributes, while on RSTS only some do.   For files that don   t, the user and/or application are expected to know what the file format is; the OS doesn   t help you.

	paul