[HECnet] Announcing TCP/IP for RSX-11M-PLUS

[Johnny Billquist]

Time for a new release announcement of TCP/IP for RSX-11M-PLUS.

Highlights:

This release has many performance improvements at the TCP level, support 
for new languages, improvements in various tools and libraries, and some 
functional improvements at protocol level.


Detailed information on things that have been done since the last release:


Documentation:
. Added information on performance issues with XEDRV ethernet driver
   provided with RSX for non-DECnet systems.
. Updated documentation with new functions and language libraries.


Interfaces:
. Changed default number of receives issues by ETHACP to 6.
. Added SET IFn: RECEIVE n to change how many outstanding receives
   to have on ethernet interface. This is now dynamic at runtime.


TCP:
. Added rejection counting for SYN packets to ports with
   no listeners.
. Bugfix. MSS should never be larger than the buffer size in TCP.
. Correct TCP ACK repeat rate to also consider the buffer size.
   With a small buffer, we cannot have a low ack rate.
. Improve TCP retransmission. If more than one packet is ACKed,
   assume we are actually on track, and reverts to normal mode.
. If we have a socket with lots of full size packets, we
   do not send window updates immediately if the window is
   growing. We might as well keep the slower rate.
. Improved TCP performance at high throughput mode.
. Changed TCP receive ACK generation to do dynamic handling
   of how often ACKs needs to be sent.
. Fixed TCP close function to not generate spurious packets.
. Changed TCP slow start window processing.
. Fix TCP retransmission logic. Under some circumstances, packet
   only retransmitted with a delay, even though they should have
   been retransmitted immediately.
. Improved TCP nagle implementation.
. Improved TCP retransmit recover logic.
. Changed TCP to allow combination of PU.TXT and PU.RXP.
. Changed TCP to start daemons with the installed default UIC.


FTP/FTPD:
. Changed FTP login routines to set system type in login routine
   instead of in open routine.
. Added init file for FTP.
. Bugfix. If FTPD was requested to list files in Unix format,
   and a file was protected, FTPD could crash.
. Added KEEPALIVE command to FTP.
. Changed FTP client to use nagle on command channel.
. Bugfix in FTP DIR command, which could crash with a stack corrupt.
. Bugfix in FTPD. If FTPD logs in to a directory without a FTP.TXT,
   the mode of the command channel ended up wrong.
. Change FTP and FTPD to better utilize tcp high throughput mode.
. Bugfix in FTPD. Files sent to FTPD did not get the correct owner set.


RMD:
. Bugfix in RMD TCP network page. Byte counters had been changed
   to 3 word fields.

Multinet:
. Bugfix in MULTINET. Some error messages was printed with a corrupt
   line number.
. Changed multinet to always push tcp data.


MAILD:
. Bugfix in MAILD. Other changes had caused MAILD to not be able to
   process mails with multiple recipients. MAILQUE.DAT file format had
   to change, so the mail queue needs to be reinitialized.
. Added proper message id handling to MAILD.
. Improve dispay of mails when reading.
. Bugfix. Unprivileged users could not create their mailbox in MAIL.
. Improved MAIL11 receive address processing.


HTTPD:
. Added ability for CGI programs to return other than 200 status.


IRCBOT:
. Changed IRCBOT to be more efficient and sane with PUSHes.


Libraries:
. Change BQTLIB to not require privileges for isco() function from C.
. Change IPC library to include listen() as well as sgetc().


Pascal:
. Added support for Oregon Pascal-2.


XLisp:
. Added XLISP and some example programs to distribution.



As usual, the distribution is available from:
ftp://mim.update.uu.se/bqtcp.dsk
ftp://mim.update.uu.se/bqtcp.tap
ftp://ftp.update.uu.se/pub/pdp11/rsx/tcpip/tcpip.dsk

The documentation is also available through ftp on Mim, or also at 
http://mim.update.uu.se/tcpipdoc

I hope people find this update useful. While there are no really 
critical issues that have been solved, I still recommend people to 
update, since this new version do contain improvements that are 
beneficial and as far as I know there are no issues or problems updating 
to this newest version.

	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