[HECnet] Connections?

[Johnny Eriksson]

The other Johnny wrote:

> Just realized I should maybe make another comment here.
> I don't fully know how Multinet under VMS is managed, or what 
> limitations there might be.
> My Multinet compatible implementation under RSX might have some issues 
> communicating with VMS nodes, but in general it seems to be working just 
> fine.
> The setup under RSX do not really have any problems with dynamic IP 
> addresses. But it does introduce a bit of exposure, since when the other 
> end has a dynamic address, Multinet will have to be able to accept 
> connections from anywhere. I have been pondering whether to enable 
> passwords on those links. But until now, it's not been a real problem, 
> since people scanning and probing ports have no clue about DECnet over 
> IP to start with.

Shameless plug or something here:

I have a program called anftunnel which as the name suggests initially
was used to handle ANF-10 packets.  It has grown a bit from that, and
can do other things as well now.  Amongst what it can do is:

*  Set up a tunnel between two machines, with optional crypto and auth.
   The passive (listening) end needs a static address, the other don't.

*  Talk to an ethernet interface (via libpcap) and tunnel ethernet frames.

*  Terminate a (virtual) sync line and tunnel the frames.  Handle TCP and
   UDP encapsulated DDCMP lines of the SIMH variety.

*  Terminate a MULTINET DECnet-over-IP link.  (untested, but given how
   simple the encapsulation is...)

*  For ANF-10, it can connect an ethernet to a sync line.  This requires
   slightly molesting the packets involved.

It should be possible to use this to tunnel DECnet/Multinet between two
nodes and keep the Multinet part local to each host.

A slight perversion would be to connect a Multinet link to a DDCMP one...

Source tarball can be found at:

  https://www.pdc.kth.se/~bygg/tops/anftunnel.tar

>    Johnny

--Johnny (another one of them)