[HECnet] Old protocols in new ones

[Thomas DeBellis]

I believe our site had three situations.  Our DN20's had both KMC's and 
DUP's.  The KMC's were used for local computer center communications of 
10 to 30 feet (the 20's were running in a star configuration).  The 
DECnet of the time was reliable enough until you put a continuous load 
on the KMC's.  If you wanted to guarantee transmission, then you had to 
write an application level protocol on top of that to declare a 
connection down and to renegotiate.   This still works with the 
inconsistent NI implementation on KLH10.

I do not recall whether we ever determined where the problem was; the 
Tops-20 DECnet III implementation of the time, the DN20 (MCB) or the 
KMC.  I don't recall what the KMC had for hardware error detection; 
since the lines were synchronous, I would imagine it would flag certain 
framing errors, at a minimum.  The DN20's were left largely unused once 
we got NI based DECnet, whose performance blew the KMC right out of the 
water.  The CI speeds were just about incomprehensible for the time.  We 
put timing code into our transfer application, but I can't remember the 
speeds but they were highly admired.

We had considered removing the DN20's, but conservatively kept them as a 
fail-back in the case of a CI or NI outage.  The other reason was for 
the 'non-local' lines that ran to other parts of the campus and long 
distance to CCnet nodes.  These both used DUP's.  I can't remember how 
the campus lines were run, but the long distance was handled by a pair 
of 9600 baud modems on leased lines.  I can't remember how the modem was 
configured; synchronous or asynchronous.

In the case of the DUP's, there were plenty of errors to be had, but 
they were not as highly loaded as the KMC's, which were saturated until 
the NI and CI came along.

The third case was that of the DN65 to talk to our IBM hardware. That 
was data center local and ran a KMC.  The protocol that was spoken was 
HASP bi-sync.  I don't recall what the error rate was; HASP would 
correct for this.  A bucketload of data went over that link.  While I 
had to mess a tiny bit with the DN60 PDP-11 code to change a translate 
table entry, I don't remember that I had to fiddle with the DN60 that 
much.  IBMSPL was another thing entirely; we were an early site and I 
had known one of the developers at Marlboro.  It had some teething 
problems, but eventually was fairly reliable.

I was wondering whether the problem of running DDCMP over UDP might be 
one of error timing.  If you blew it on a KMC or DUP, the hardware would 
let you know pretty quick; milliseconds.  The problem with UDP is how 
soon you declare an error.  If you have a packet going a long way, it 
might take too long to declare the error.  It's a thought, but you can 
get delays in TCP, too, so I'm not sure if the idea is half-baked.

On 3/27/2021 1:59 PM, John Forecast wrote:
>
>> On Mar 27, 2021, at 11:06 AM, Mark Berryman <mark at theberrymans.com 
>> <mailto:mark at theberrymans.com>> wrote:
>>
>> DDCMP was originally designed to run over intelligent synchronous 
>> controllers, such as the DMC-11 or the DMR-11, although it could also 
>> be run over async serial lines.  Either of these could be local or 
>> remote.  If remote, they were connected to a modem to talk over a 
>> circuit provided by a common carrier and async modems had built in 
>> error correction.  From the DMR-11 user manual describing its features:
>> DDCMP implementation which handles message sequencing and error 
>> correction by automatic retransmission
>>
>
> No. DDCMP was designed way before any of those intelligent 
> controllers. DDCMP V3.0 was refined during 1974 and released as part 
> of DECnet Phase I. The customer I was working with had a pair of 
> PDP-11/40’s, each having a DU-11 for DECnet communication at 9600 bps. 
> DDCMP V4.0 was updated in 1977 and released in 1978 as part of DECnet 
> Phase II which included DMC-11 support. The DMC-11/DMR-11 included an 
> onboard implementation of DDCMP to provide message sequencing and 
> error correction. Quite frequently, customers would have a DMC-11 on a 
> system communicating with a DU-11 or DUP-11 on a remote system.
>
>   John.
>
>> In other words, DDCMP expected the underlying hardware to provide 
>> guaranteed transmission or be running on a line where the incidence 
>> of data loss was very low.  UDP provides neither of these.
>>
>> DDCMP via UDP over the internet is a very poor choice and will result 
>> in exactly what you are seeing.  This particular connection choice 
>> should be limited to your local LAN where UDP packets have a much 
>> higher chance of surviving.
>>
>> GRE survives much better on the internet than does UDP and TCP 
>> guarantees delivery.  If possible, I would recommend using one these 
>> encapsulations for DECnet packets going to any neighbors over the 
>> internet rather than UDP.
>>
>> Mark Berryman
>>
>>> On Mar 27, 2021, at 4:40 AM, Keith Halewood 
>>> <Keith.Halewood at pitbulluk.org <mailto:Keith.Halewood at pitbulluk.org>> 
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>> I might have posted this to just Paul and Johnny but it’s probably 
>>> good for a bit of general discussion and it might enlighten me 
>>> because I often have a lot of difficulty in separating the layers 
>>> and functionality around tunnels of various types, carrying one 
>>> protocol on top of another.
>>> I use Paul’s excellent PyDECnet and about half the circuits I have 
>>> connecting to others consist of DDCMP running over UDP. I feel as 
>>> though there’s something missing but that might be misunderstanding. 
>>> A DDCMP packet is encapsulated in a UDP one and sent. The receiver 
>>> gets it or doesn’t because that’s the nature of UDP. I’m discovering 
>>> it’s often the latter. A dropped HELLO or its response brings a 
>>> circuit down. This may explain why there’s a certain amount of 
>>> flapping between PyDECnet’s DDCMP over UDP circuits. I notice it a 
>>> lot between area 31 and me but but much less so with others.
>>> In the old days, DDCMP was run over a line protocol (sync or async) 
>>> that had its own error correction/retransmit protocol, was it not? 
>>> So a corrupted packet containing a HELLO would be handled at the 
>>> line level and retransmitted usually long before a listen timer expired?
>>> Are we missing that level of correction and relying on what happens 
>>> higher up in DECnet to handle missing packets?
>>> I’m having similar issues (at least on paper) with an implementation 
>>> of the CI packet protocol over UDP having initially and quite 
>>> fatally assumed that a packet transmitted over UDP would arrive and 
>>> therefore wouldn’t need any of the lower level protocol that a real 
>>> CI needed. TCP streams are more trouble in other ways.
>>> Just some thoughts
>>> Keith
>>
>
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