[HECnet] My RSTS/E system...

[Brian Hechinger]

You may remember my attempts to map the network. I ran into these issues
exactly. It was a fun exercise but ultimately wasn't very realistic.

On Sun, Aug 12, 2018, 05:25 Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

> 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
>
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