[HECnet] Announcing TCP/IP V2.5 for RSX-11M-PLUS

[Johnny Billquist]

Time for a new release announcement of TCP/IP for RSX-11M-PLUS.

Since I have now started to try and properly number releases, this is 
release V2.5 of BQTCP/IP.


It's been five months since the last official update, and there been 
various smaller improvements.


Highlights:
. Improved startup scripts making the whole process more safe.
. Performance improvements in many places.
. Added LPR protocol to LPT symbiont spooler.


Detailed information on things that have been done since the last release:


Startup:
. If CEX does not exist, try to load XE:
   driver automatically. If IPAPPL is executed but there is no IP:
   loaded, exit immediately.


IP:
. Added class broadcast address handling.


TCP:
. Added PU.ACK as an option on TCP ports.
. Improved TCP ACK strategy.
. Improved default TCP configuration.
. Improved TCP push handling. Only set PSH on last packet of sequence of 
packets included in push.
. Corrected reads from TCP. Under some circumstances, read could return 
IE.NLN on a closed socket, when it should have returned IE.EOF.
. Improved TCP fast retransmit logic.
. Bugfix in TCP. Make sure congestion window never goes below MSS.
. Rewritten the TCP congestion avoidance and slow start logic.
. Impoved TCP window update logic.
. Reworked TCP MSS logic to better handle if MSS is asymetric.
. Improve TCP retry logic in case of remote side constantly ACKing old 
data. Connection should eventually be closed.


DNS:
. Added handling of zero length domain names in DNS.


FTP/FTPD:
. Improved FTP and FTPD push strategy.
. Added port number to host string in FTPD login message.
. Changed FTP client to probe for RSX system to after login. (Some Linux 
ftp servers are broken, and gives multiple responses to commands given 
before logging in.)
. Reworked FTP client ETA computation.
. Added check in FTP if run from VT device, and disable progress bar.
. Improved error handling in FTPD.
. Bugfix in FTP. Under some circumstances, a successful GET could end up 
deleted the received file. (Reported by Ludwig Tauer)


TELNET/TELNETD:
. Modified telnet server to use PU.ACK.
. Improved TELNET and TELNETD push strategy.
. Bugfix in telnet client. It could loose input terminal characters in 
some circumstances.
. Bugfix in telnet client. It could get into a state where it stopped 
reading from the terminal.


LPT:
. Added LPR protocol to LPT.


MAIL:
. Improved network reject error handling in MAIL11 sending.
. Changed mail queue output format.
. In MAIL, make sure addresses are properly reformatted when receiving 
mails over MAIL11.
. In MAIL, when sending over SMTP, strip any DECnet part of destination 
address. Does not make sense to keep that.
. Added SMTP Source domain logical name for outgoing mails.
. Improved mail headers content.



Some additional notes:

As usual, I would recommend people to update as soon as possible.
The changes are not critical, but will lead to a much better experience.
For the RSX fixes to be applied, it is necessary to answer yes to the
question about installing RSX patches. Otherwise those fixes will not
be installed. This does not lead to any failures, but it might lead to
some components running exactly the way you might be expecting (such as
daemons running under the wrong user).


As usual, the distribution is available from:
ftp://mim.update.uu.se/bqtcp.dsk
ftp://mim.update.uu.se/bqtcp.tap
ftp://ftp.update.uu.se/pub/pdp11/rsx/tcpip/tcpip.dsk

(As an additional note, I have become aware of that there is some device
proxying access to the ftp service at Mim. This might lead to failure to 
transfer large files. If you observe such problems, try connecting to 
Mim at port 10021 instead, which is an alternative port for the ftp 
server, and which circumvents the proxy.)

The documentation is also available through ftp on Mim, or also at 
http://mim.update.uu.se/tcpipdoc

I hope people find this update useful.


	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol