[HECnet] Multinet alternatives ...

[Keith Halewood]

I managed to get the KLH10 emulator compiled and running the Panda distribution of TOPS-20 under Raspbian on a Pi 4 without too much trouble. Its 'dpni20' process has no trouble talking to a TAP device which is bridged with eth0 and thence onto the mixed in-memory/real-ethernet DECnet connection to the HECnet. Admittedly, I'm not that familiar with TOPS-20 or the 'hardware' on which it runs. My main interest was MDL at the time. It's still running as WALACH on the HECnet. My main 'take-away' from the experience was: "HOW many questions do I have to answer in order to create a directory on this thing??"

On the SIMH side of things, I'm a bit stuck getting TOPS-10 running from the DO scripts from the URL.... [I appear to have misplaced this bit of information]

Keith

From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Rob Jarratt
Sent: 26 February 2020 11:51
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: RE: [HECnet] Multinet alternatives ...

I can't remember now what the problems were, but I think I had problems getting Phase III running on SIMH with the KMC or KDP (or whatever it was).

From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE<mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE> <owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE<mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE>> On Behalf Of Thomas DeBellis
Sent: 25 February 2020 20:14
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE<mailto:hecnet at Update.UU.SE>
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Multinet alternatives ...


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<mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE> <owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE><mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE> On Behalf Of Robert Armstrong
Sent: 25 February 2020 14:42
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE<mailto: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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