[HECnet] Intermittent Connection with PyDECnet?

[Robert Armstrong]

  FWIW, you can’t/couldn’t do verification on an Ethernet circuit anyway.  It only works on point to point links.   Command completion may be smart enough to only show you the options that are applicable to your input so far, or maybe TOPS20 just doesn’t have it…

 

Bob

 

 

From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Thomas DeBellis
Sent: Monday, March 2, 2020 3:55 PM
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Intermittent Connection with PyDECnet?

 

I appear to have neither CIRCUIT VERIFICATION nor NODE TRANSMIT PASSWORD, viz:

NCP>set cirCUIT ni-0 ? ALL
  or one of the following:
 ACTIVE         BABBLE      BLOCKING     CHANNEL       COST     COUNTER      DEAD
 DTE            DYING       HELLO        INACTIVE      LINE     LISTEN       MAXIMUM
 NUMBER         OWNER       POLLING      RECALL        ROUTER   SERVICE      STATE
 TRANSMIT       TRIBUTARY   TYPE         USAGE

NCP>set noDE venti2:: ? ALL
  or one of the following:
 ADDRESS   CIRCUIT
  or one of the following:
 AREA          BROADCAST        BUFFER          CONSOLE       COUNTER
 CPU           DELAY            DIAGNOSTIC      DUMP          HARDWARE
 HOST          IDENTIFICATION   INACTIVITY      INCOMING      LOAD
 MAXIMUM       OUTGOING         RETRANSMIT      ROUTING       SECONDARY
 SEGMENT       SERVICE          SOFTWARE        STATE         SUBADDRESSES
 TERTIARY      TYPE

I may be mis-remembering how our DN200 was configured.  I believe the Top-20 NCP parser may have shared keyword tables with other DECnet implementations via BLISS at one point.  Anyway, I recall at least some of it was BLISS.  I haven't look in that particular box lately, but the parse tables appear to assembler now, with heavy uses of GLXMAC macros.

The Tops-20 operator interface has two 'sub-modes', as it were: NCP and LCP.  NCP parses DECnet related keywords.  LCP is used for LAT configuration.  The operator subsystem is kind of neat; OPR parsers send packets to Orion, a communications server and router.  It notes an NCP subset and routes that to NMLT20 which contains just what you think it would.

Early versions of NMLT20 (about 1980) appeared insufficiently productized.  It could hang in a loop or (more frequently) crash for no readily apparent reason.  We submitted a rather large number of SPR's...  However, it's quite stable now; I don't believe I've had a single crash.  I have yet to come to a fully informed conclusion about the lexical interface; I sometimes get the impression that it parses for more than it can actually do.

Elsewhere in Tops-20, DECnet implementation is a mixed bag; most of the monitor code appears finished; I go months without reboots and that is with active development.  The user mode code is another matter entirely.  I had my hands full fixing a number of issues with DAP and FAL.  It was invaluable having heterogeneous HECnet nodes to test against, RSX 11M+ and VMS.  SETNOD needs some finishing and perhaps some additional functionality.  I have yet to look at FTS; I don't see how it can get or generate any traffic at all.  The monitor interface (NFT:) does not appear to be operational.  Elsewhere (perhaps Galaxy) appears to have no submission interface.  Johnny and I have some minor tweaks to flush out with MAIL11 (in addition to the changes that I've already put in).

 

On 3/2/20 3:25 PM, Robert Armstrong wrote:

>I don't see where I would set an id and password in 7-1-CONFIG or in NCP.

  Don’t know about TOPS-20, but in NCP/NICE/NML it’s

               SET CIRCUIT … VERIFICATION ENABLED

and

               SET NODE … TRANSMIT PASSWORD …

The password the remote node sends has to match the one that’s associated with that node in the local DECnet database.

Bob

 

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