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

[Supratim Sanyal]

31.37 (TWONKY) is just a straight TWONKY distribution on KLH-10. All 
required keyboard interactions to get it to boot up are consistently the 
same; so I might be able to wrap it up around an expect script ... worth 
a shot.


On 3/10/20 9:46 PM, Thomas DeBellis wrote:
>
> 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?

-- 
Supratim Sanyal, W1XMT
39.19151 N, 77.23432 W
QCOCAL::SANYAL via HECnet

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sonic.net/pipermail/hecnet-list/attachments/20200310/7452e26a/attachment-0001.html>