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

[Johnny Billquist]

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

Highlights:


. TCP have had some potential fatal bugs fixed, and some significant 
performance improvements.
. FTP have received significant performance improvements.
. Various tools and drivers have had improvements in order to support 
more than one ethernet interface.


*** For these reasons, it is strongly recommended that systems be 
upgraded to the latest version at your earliest convenience.



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


IPGEN:
. Corrected IPGEN to be able to generate configurations with multiple 
Ethernet interfaces.
. Bugfix for no purge options, which did not work.


IF:
. Bugfix in interface driver. IO.RIF did not return proper status.


UDP:
. Added ability in UDP to bind socket to specific interface.


TCP:
. Improved TCP retransmission strategy.
. Rewrote TCP ACK generation and window update handling.
. Bugfix. A TCP connection in the process of closing down would just 
absorb incoming SYN packets to the connection. They should be responded 
to with a RST.
. Bugfix in some longword processing that could potentially cause wrong 
effects under rare circumstances.
. Bugfix in TCP. I/O writes of more than 8K was accepted, but actual 
data was not transferred correctly.
. Bugfix in TCP. I/O reads of more than 8K was accepted, but should not. 
This could crash the system.


DHCP:
. Corrected DHCP to detect if interface do not start.
. Rewritten DHCP to handle interfaces properly also if there are 
multiple interfaces using DHCP.
. Rewritten DHCP to better handle options and to try explicit renews 
instead of always starting over with request when time is up.


IFCONFIG:
. Add indication in IFCONFIG SHOW IF to indicate if interface is 
running, also for DHCP controlled interfaces.


TELNETD:
. Added additional space in telnet UCB, and telnetd now stores remote 
address in UCB. (Separate changes to RSX can enable reading this out via 
QIO to TT:)


SPOOF:
. Added notifying the SPOOF handler for some more TCP situations.
. Bugfix in SPOOF. Under some circumstances, it could loose track of 
hosts it was blocking, and never unblock them.
. Changed spoofer to be capable of blocking different network block sizes.


FTP/FTPD:
. Improved file handling in FTP for RSX and block mode. Performance is 
now close to 2x as fast as before in some situations.


Multinet:
. Improved handling of connections in Multinet.
. Added ability to change mode of Multinet links to either be VMS 
compatible, or pure DDCMP style.
. Bugfix in MLTNET. There was an odd address error in one place.
. Improved MLTNET handling and recovery from some communication errors.
. Updated IPNCONFIG.CMD to new version from Oleg Safiullin.


MAILD:
. Corrected block lock handling in MAILD, which could sometimes keep 
blocks locked for long times for no good reason.
. Mailbox format slightly changed. MBXUPD needed for upgrade.


XLISP:
. Added port as a parameter to connect function in XLISP.


Datatrieve-11:
. Added proper interface to Datetrieve-11 from PDP-11 C.


MCR:
. Bugfix. DEV /FILES could crash RSX.



*** Important notice about MAILD ***

The changes to MAILD are not seamless. When installing the new version,
the mailbox update program should be run, in order to upgrade all user
mailboxes to the new mailbox format. The task for this is MBXUPD.TSK.
There are no issues with running this task several times. A mailbox that
has already been updates will not be modified anymore by the update task.


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.


	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