[HECnet] Speaking of old decnet releases

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2018-09-19 23:30, Paul Koning wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Sep 19, 2018, at 5:26 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
>>
>> On 2018-09-19 20:16, Jeffrey H. Johnson wrote:
>>>> On Sep 19, 2018, at 1:45 PM, Steve Davidson <steve at davidson.net> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>  From what I remember it was phase iii.  I used to support IAS-11 between 1980-1983 at the Corporate Operations Group, Maynard, MA
>>> That's awesome! IAS doesn't get the love it deserves.
>>> I'm should to try bringing up an IAS 3.4 system again from the tapes at Bitsavers later tonight - I've previously run 3.0, but had some issue during the SYSGEN on 3.4 — exactly the issue I can't recall right now.
>>> But, unfortunately seems it won't able to be on HECnet.
>>
>> There is (limited) compatibility between phase III and phase IV.
>> It would be possible to be on HECnet, but only accessible by other machines in the same area, I think.
>> Poul would know better what the restrictions are.
> 
> Yes, you can only get to nodes in the same area as the one the Phase III node is connected to.  That is, except for application that support stringing together node names.  Some use object 63 ("passthrough" or "PMR") for that; I need to reverse engineer the protocol at some point if I can find a program that talks to that object.  Does anyone have that code?  It was generally used on the DEC internal network because that was too big, but I don't think it was let out.

A PMR server is included as unsupported software with DECnet on RSX.
So I have the code for the server side.

RSX NFT and FTS supports using PMR when accessing remote files. The 
requirements (according to the manual) is that all intermediate nodes 
needs to be VMS, and the final node can be VMS or Ultrix, but this is 
documented in relationship on how to trasfer files to/from DECnet Phase 
V nodes. So maybe no surprise about the claim that intermediate nodes 
should be VMS then.

   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