[HECnet] Announcing TCP/IP for RSX-11M-PLUS

[Mark Matlock]

Johnny,
   Thanks for the new release of TCP/IP for RSX! Also thanks for keeping it functional on original hardware not just higher speed emulations. I currently have your TCP/IP running on two physical PDP-11/83s and one PDP-11/73. They all handle the network traffic at higher speeds than DECnet ever could. I look forward to your developments on email supporting both legacy DEC and SMTP protocols.

   The FTP capabilities for RSX has enabled me to transfer all of the DECUS RSX Sig tapes from the RSX Freeware CD ISO image from the internet to my PDP-11s and have all of that software available as easily mountable virtual disks. I can remember taking blank tapes to the
DECUS meetings in Chicago and trading for the latest SIG tapes back in 1982-1987 or so. This is all so easy today with the SCSI2SD devices
where a small 8GB SD card can be formatted as four 2GB disks. Thanks for your continued improvements to FTP.

   Also, this past year your IPNET HECnet bridge capability finally enabled me to connect to HECnet. This has been very interesting to learn
more about wide area networking with DECnet.

   The TELNET capabilities are great to be able to open multiple windows on my iMac to various PDP-11s at the house as well as log into to them remotely when I travel.

Thanks for all the hours you put into RSX development this year and I hope you have a very Happy New Year!

Mark




On Dec 30, 2016, at 8:10 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:

> Time for a new release announcement of TCP/IP for RSX-11M-PLUS.
> 
> This release address some bugs and also address some security issues.
> I strongly encourage people to upgrade to the latest version to get these fixes, since they can otherwise cause system crashes.
> 
> This is definitely the best release yet, and a great way to finish off 2016. I hope people find it usable, and truth be told, the errors and crashes I mostly work on now are obscure corner cases, that I mostly only actually get to see on Magica.Update.UU.SE, which is a real PDP-11/70. Something about running on slower hardware seems to bring out some interesting corner cases. :-)
> Mim.Update.UU.SE have been running very solid for very long times in the face of constant probing by random places all over the internet. On average, there is about 2 attempts per minute to probe Mim and Magica, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As you can guess, this runs up to serious numbers given a few days. Also, over a general week, Mim will serve around 1G of data to various people and crawlers all over the Internet. (Yes, there is a reason some counters in TCP/IP is 64 bits wide...)
> 
> Things that have been done since the last release:
> 
> TCP:
> - TCP receive packet sequence number checking could erroneously accept some packets that was not inside the current window. The chance of any packet getting by this is very small, but if some specific sequence numbers came in, which did manage to get past the checks, this could cause a system crash.
> - Improved queuing of SYN packets for services that were already serving
> the max number of concurrent requests. Previously such packets were immediately rejected. Now they can be queued.
> - Improved task activation control to avoid DOS attack vulnerability. If many requests get queued up, and the system was getting continued high loads, the TCP connections got torn down, but requested processes could queue up in unlimited numbers, causing pool exhaustion.
> - Added correct handling or errors during task activation. Previously, TCP would just cause a system crash under this circumstance. Now, the task is instead removed, and the connection being created is torn down.
> - Added new statistics counters for failed task creations, failed daemon initiations, and improved statistics counters for TCP data outside of window.
> 
> FTP:
> - Added SUPERSEDE command, to control if existing local files should be overwritten or not when retrieving files.
> - Improved handling of file version numbers. If given, FTP will now make use of file version information, including using the same version number as on the remote system for MGET, when the file version field is given in the filename argument.
> - Changed code so that already existing file error is not considered fatal, and will not abort an ongoing MGET command.
> 
> FTPD:
> - Added SPOOF notification from FTPD, so that abusive sites automatically get blocked when abusing through FTPD.
> 
> BP2LIB:
> - Added RECV function, which can read from TCP or UDP without any interpretation of data the way LINPUT will do.
> 
> HTTP:
> - Changed code to use RECV instead of LINPUT for reading from remote side.
> - Fix content length calculation for case where the web server adds a little bit of own information in addition to what is read from a file.
> 
> IRCBOT:
> - Changed code to use RECV instead of LINPUT for reading from remote side.
> 
> SPOOF:
> - Changed register usage layout for better information when looking at the task with TAL.
> - Added SEND DATA interface to SPOOF.
> 
> TELNETD:
> - Changed register usage layout for better information when looking at the task with TAL.
> - Improved connection tracking code to avoid some race conditions in connection counting.
> 
> NTPDATE:
> - Task default priority changed to 100. to improve the response times needed for this task.
> 
> IPRMD:
> - Corrected erroneous build files (fix provided by Oleg Safiullin.)
> 
> Installation scripts:
> - Corrected erroneous code in installation that checked for already installed commons. (Fix provided by Oleg Safiullin.)
> 
> 
> As usual, the distribution is available from:
> ftp://mim.update.uu.se/bqtcp.dsk
> ftp://mim.update.uu.se/bqtcp.tap
> ftp://ftp.update.uu.se/pub/pdp11/rsx/tcpip/tcpip.dsk
> 
> The documentation is also available through ftp on Mim, or also at http://mim.update.uu.se/tcpipdoc
> 
> The firewall for Mim have now been removed, so no need for the alternate ports, but Mim is still listening to the alternate ports as well.
> ftp: 10021
> telnet: 10023
> 
> 	Johnny
> 
> -- 
> Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
>                                     ||  on a psychedelic trip
> email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
> pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol