[HECnet] Connecting an HP Itanium BL860c to HECNET... without ethernet

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2021-12-10 20:32, cyb 2600 wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> A little while ago I purchased an HP BL860c server blade. It has an 
> Itanium 2 CPU and I was able to install OpenVMS 8.4 on it. However I do 
> NOT have a HP Bladesystem chassis to put the blade in, meaning I can 
> only connect to it via the SUV console cable which provides usb, serial, 
> and VGA. There's no way to get ethernet out of the thing without 
> plugging it into a rather gigantic Bladesystem chassis that I don't 
> have. If it was an x64 based blade running windows I could just use a 
> USB->Ethernet adapter but of course those things don't have OpenVMS drivers.
> 
> Given ethernet's not an option, would there be any way to tunnel DECNET 
> over the serial port? It seems like that was possible on VAXen and maybe 
> even Alphas but I've no mention of doing it on an Itanium. Or if anybody 
> else has any ideas of how I could network this thing I would appreciate it.

Others have already said a lot. But to just add a little more.
As mentioned, at least on VAXen, you can run DECnet over a serial line. 
It might very well be possible also on Alpha and Itanium. Check the 
docs. Even if it isn't officially supported, just try turning it on. In 
VMS, the async DDCMP connections are done over the normal terminal 
driver, so I would suspect there is a fair chance it works, unless they 
actually ripped that code out.

However, if we talk HECnet, this isn't enough. You then need to get that 
serial looped back into something that can connect to some remote side.
My original HECnet links were actually done this way. I had physical 
serial ports on machines, then then I had another machine at each end to 
which the serial ports connected, and between these two other machines, 
I ran a simple program that just forwarded the bytes on the serial ports 
on both sides.

It worked, but of course this is slow, as it was just 9600 bps. So 
eventually I wrote my bridge program to just forward ethernet packets 
instead.

But in your case, you'd need something like this again. I think you 
might be able to just hook it up to PyDECnet. It has DDCMP, and I would 
hope it could be convinced to talk over an actual serial port. If it 
can't, I'm sure Paul could fix that.

   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