[HECnet] KLH-10 TOPS-10 DECnet Executor Configuration Persistence

[Thomas DeBellis]

I think you're right, but it has been _decades_ since I last used 
Tops-10.  At WPI, we had a KA-10 running a much modified 6.03 series 
monitor that we were quite proud of.  At Marlboro, the project that I 
was working on (FILE-FINDER, a database for DUMPER tapes) was quite 
Tops-20 centric; we depended on files with holes in them.

I'm unaware of any systems level structured data store in either Tops-10 
or Tops-20 with the exception of the Quasar failsoft file (QSRFSS, holds 
queue, print, batch requests across crashes).  I don't find this 
surprising; if you crash and corrupt a file with confuration information 
in it, a flat ASCII file is whaaay easier to recover than an specially 
engineered database.  The binary accounting and error files are 
sequential and don't count, IMHO.

Under Tops-20, we used the following 'trick' for start-up speed and 
persisted configuration.  The configuration file was 'compiled' into 
binary and directly mapped into memory on start-up.

 1. This was necessary for LPTSPL as it is started up for jobs, but shut
    down and put into a quiescent state when there is nothing left to
    print.  When you have a lot of printers, reparsing LPFORM.INI can be
    a real dog.  Very noticeable.
 2. I got the idea from the mailer, which does the same thing for
    mailing-list.txt
 3. The EXEC will also do it; you can restore a binary environment with
    all your special scripts really fast (like on PUSH or LOGIN)
 4. I had been thinking about doing this for the Extended Mode FTP
    server, but I'm not sure it's worth it.  I instrumented the start up
    time and it's in the milliseconds.  Probably would be necessary for
    a couple hundred simultaneous small requests.

If I ever get truly serious about supporting Galaxy again, then probably 
I'll bite the bullet and put up Tops-10 so I can validate execution.

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> On 3/10/20 9:25 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>
> I've never used Tops-10 as an operator, so I can't answer most of 
> this, but one question I think I can...
>
> My understanding is that neither Tops-10, nor TOPS-20 have a 
> persistent database. Instead you need to have a script that does all 
> the definitions, and you need to run it at every boot. But I could be 
> confused about that one.
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> On 2020-03-11 01:50, Supratim Sanyal wrote:
>>
>> KLH-10 TOPS-10 noob questions:
>>
>> 1) At the TOPS-10 boot startup option prompt, I can type in CHANGE 
>> and then set the DECnet address. How do I make it persist across 
>> reboots and not have to do this every time?
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