[HECnet] Multinet alternatives ...

[Thomas DeBellis]

What issues had you encountered talking to Tops-20??

If you are using the SIMH emulator for a KS processor, then the latest 
version of Tops-20 you can run is 4.2, which I believe will do Phase 
III.  Since there was never any Ethernet adapter for the KS (it was a 
massbus device), I believe you must speak DDCMP, which we used with 
KMC's, which would do 56Kbs.  There was a slower adaptor for 9.6Kbs, but 
the name escapes me at the moment.

I've had little trouble with Tops-20 V7 DECnet; that is, once I got it 
to working.  When I was modifying FAL/DAP to accept anonymous transfers, 
I and and others beat on it quite a lot to wring the bugs out.  These 
regression tests were against another 20, RSX 11M+ (or whatever MIM:: is 
running) and a couple of Vaxen.  The operating system level code was 
robust; no crashes.

We found some interesting bugs; I think my favorite was RSX wanting all 
capital letters for months and Tops-20 sending capitalized months, so 
file dates got messed up.  There were others, but they took some effort 
to remediate; so, not so favorite...

On 2/25/20 1:38 PM, Rob Jarratt wrote:
>
> Mine has been built to be portable (it is in C). I have it running on 
> Windows, Debian and FreeBSD. I have not tried on VMS, but I did do a 
> partial port to VAXELN. I don’t foresee great difficulties getting it 
> to run on VMS. It looks like I may have done some partial VMS work, 
> but it has been a while since I looked. I could look into 
> reviving/continuing that if there is interest.
>
> Mine won’t talk to TOPS10/20, yet. I started something on that too if 
> I remember correctly, I did build a DDCMP implementation which I think 
> partially worked. I think I foundered on just getting DECnet running 
> on TOPS20 on SIMH, I did some work with Mark Pizzolato and Timothe 
> Litt to build a KDP emulation, but I struggled to keep up with them 
> and gave up in the end. I am not sure where that went.
>
> I need a bit of time to work out what my status is I think as it has 
> been a while.
>
> Regards
>
> Rob
>
> *From:*owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE <owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE> *On 
> Behalf Of *Robert Armstrong
> *Sent:* 25 February 2020 14:42
> *To:* hecnet at Update.UU.SE
> *Subject:* [HECnet] Multinet alternatives ...
>
>    What are the alternatives for bridging DECnet systems across the 
> Internet that don’t require any special hardware and can be self 
> hosted on OpenVMS/VAX?
>
>   I’m aware of Paul’s Python router, but I didn’t think it ran on a 
> VAX.  Am I wrong about that?  Is there a Python for OpenVMS/VAX?  I 
> believe there’s a port for AXP but I didn’t know about one for VAX.
>
>   And I saw Rob mentioned his user mode DECnet router.  Same questions 
> – what environment does that require?   And I saw mention it being 
> both Multinet and simh DDCMp compatible – will it talk to a simh 
> KS10/TOPS10/DMR ?
>
> Bob
>
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