[HECnet] My RSTS/E system...

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2018-08-12 04:55, Mark Abene wrote:
> Honestly mapping the whole network seems a little redundant, since 
> Johnny already does that and the information is reasonably up to date on 
> his web site.

Well, that's not really true. I do not map, or try to keep some kind of 
map of HECnet. I have my nodename database, which is entirely voluntary 
to register nodes in, and I know that not all nodes on HECnet are in there.
In addition, this does not give much clue about how things are 
connected, and for some machines, nothing more than the owner, name and 
number is registered.

That said, I do not think it is realistic to automatically try to map 
out HECnet anyway, so I think that any such attempts should be thought 
about a second time, and probably be abandoned.

There are several problems with trying any kind of mapping. The first is 
that there are no proper protocol that is suitable. NICE would be the 
obvious first choice, but for example Cisco routers do not provide NICE 
at all. And so, you can not traverse and follow connections that way.
There are no other way of just exploring what connections exist, so then 
we instead have to resort to an exhaustive search of all node numbers, 
using all kind of protocols a machine *might* answer to, which will 
trigger all kind of logging events and possibly security systems getting 
activated, which is not good.

Some kind of voluntary system is the only acceptable option I think. If 
people want to, that could be a way. Possibly using FAL to explore and 
find other nodes, but it would have to be based on lists of machines to 
probe, which would need to be manually kept up to date.
Similar things have been attempted in the past, with mixed to poor 
results, I would say.

   Johnny

> 
> -Mark
> 
> 
> On Sat, Aug 11, 2018 at 7:41 AM, Supratim Sanyal <supratim at riseup.net 
> <mailto:supratim at riseup.net>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi Mark,
> 
>     I have DCL script generating this web page once a week - perhaps you
>     see this pinging your system? Or maybe I was looking for a guest
>     account many months ago for some reason I can’t remember.
>     http://sanyalnet-openvms-vax.freeddns.org:82/falserver/hecnet-status.html
>     <http://sanyalnet-openvms-vax.freeddns.org:82/falserver/hecnet-status.html>
> 
>     Supratim Sanyal
>     Germantown, MD
> 
> 
>     On Aug 11, 2018, at 12:15 AM, Mark Abene <phiber at phiber.com
>     <mailto:phiber at phiber.com>> wrote:
> 
>>     OK, so who is "SANYAL" at node 1.550? If you'd like an account on
>>     my RSTS/E system, all you need do is ask. I'm one of those sys
>>     admins who actually reads his event logs.  :)
>>
>>     Regards,
>>     Mark
>>
> 


-- 
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