[HECnet] DECnet for Linux

[Mark J. Blair]

Please forgive me for letting this thread age in my inbox for a while, but I'll speak up, too. I appreciate this work!

I had previously set up a VM with an old enough Debian distribution to support DECnet in order to get some filesystem images off of my VAX-11/730, with partial success. I was able to copy off images of a few RL-02 packs, but wasn't able to copy a block-level image of its R80 drive. The copy aborted when it hit the first bad block, and I didn't (and still don't) know enough VMS to work around that.

I have since changed my approach to setting up a SIMH emulation of a VAX running recent enough OpenVMS to speak both DECnet and TCP/IP fluently in order to serve as a bridge between my modern systems and the older DECnet-speaking hardware. But being able to have a recent Linux kernel speaking DECnet would also be very helpful!

I'd like to run the SIMH emulation on a small embedded computer that I can leave on all the time without burning lots of power, such as a BeagleBoard or Raspberry Pi. It would be very nice if that emulation host could also natively speak DECnet. I tried building the DECnet drivers that are still present in the Linux distro, and using the userland stuff that's (surprisingly?) still present in the debian distro that the BeagleBoards use, and it didn't work. I hope I'll be able to find time soon to try out the patches, and I hope that they will make it into the mainline Linux distributions.

-- 
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/

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