[HECnet] Tops-20 ANONYMOUS FAL/DAP Testing Update

[Thomas DeBellis]

VMS testing is largely complete and resulted in a number of tweaks.  
This was particularly the case for logging as VMS appeared to be more 
productized in this area.   I picked up a number of good ideas, most of 
which I've implemented.  I also had a rather glaring omission; I had 
completely forgotten to implement restrictions on PRINT...  There was 
also a problem of properly reporting error codes; in some cases, a 
wildcard request could come back from the 20 with no indication 
whatsoever that all the candidate files were rejected due to lexical 
restrictions.  The workaround gives a result, but apparently imperfectly 
(see below).

RSX testing has been quite interesting.  It seems that the 20 doesn't 
appear have _ever_ reported month formats properly. The DAP 5.6 
specification appears to be neutral in certain areas as to case 
sensitivity.  Most importantly, the case of a month is not made 
explicit, although the abbreviations are uppercase.  The 20 uses a 
monitor call (ODTIM%) to convert from the 36 bit internal format to 
text, yielding capitalized months.  So, instead of *DEC* for a month, 
you get *Dec*. RSX is sensitive to this and reports all dates and times 
as zero. It was an easy fix to uppercase everything.  Kudos to Johnny 
for an amazing guess in that area.

Of more concern is the fact that certain results from the 20 can cause 
the RSX DAP client (NFT) to go into an Infinite Loop, necessitating an 
abort!  This is suspected to be incorrect error reporting on the 20's 
side.  So I've got some digging to do in that area.  I'll get to that in 
a few days; I had a few more access restrictions that I wanted to 
implement to give additional granularity.

I'm hopeful for some RSTS results in the not too distant future.

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