[HECnet] Here there be dragons...

[Keith Halewood]

Hi,

I know HECnet "should not be regarded as a serious networking setup, nor should it be expected to work 24/7" to quote Johnny's web page on the subject. I find it fun in a 'way back when' sense because way back then, as a student encountering VMS for the first time, the real DEC VAX 11/780 two-node cluster at the university was connected together via its CI and to the outside world by KMV X25 devices. The latter devices only talked the old UK 'Coloured Books' protocols and DECnet wasn't (officially) allowed over Janet. So you can imagine how underwhelming the output of various NCP SHOW commands was, even with the addition of a standalone Systime VAX and the odd departmental MicroVAX to the DECnet, using a mixture of KMVs, asynch DDCMP, eventually X25 1984 (pink book?) over Ethernet and then unencapsulated DECnet over Ethernet. All this was around the time of VMS 5.4 I think. Departmentally, we also used CMUTEK TCP/IP software to talk to the world when UK Academia finally accepted that IP was the way to go and OSI just wasn't going to happen.

Anyway, the point(s).

It's really nice to be able to see a page full of circuits, nodes, areas etc. as a result of being connected to the HECnet. In combination with Paul's excellent mapper joining up geography with connectivity, there's a certain 'warm fuzzy feeling' being part of a community like this... even if our nodes do more of the talking than we do. Harking back to the hobbyist bit though, I have to stop myself from being disappointed when nodes drop off for whatever reason especially long term. I've not seen inbound links from 29.400 and 29.500 for a while now. I occasionally wonder where area 8 is too - geographically less than 10 miles away possibly yet I've not seen any of it up and running on the HECnet during my connection to it.

I'm not complaining about any of this, just wondering... as well as staying as far away from source-code control topics as possible :)

Keith
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