[HECnet] "IP protocols on DECnet'

[Thomas DeBellis]

All of them mostly except HTTP.

The MMAILR that comes with PANDA has some brokeness, but works over 
DECnet well enough.  This is what I use between my machines (not TCP/IP 
based SMTP).  The way it is implemented makes debugging particularly 
challenging and I have yet to consider what to change to facilitate 
this.  I had to do some hacks to the monitor to get the HSTNAM module 
some things it wanted.

The PANDA Telnet client works over DECnet, but is limited to 36 bit 
hosts as it uses the simple NRT protocol.  I looked at this and SETHOST 
in order to properly do the connection code in Kermit.

The Tops-20 FTP client has hooks for all sorts of protocols, such as 
Chaosnet and PUP.  Putting in DECnet would be quite straightforward and 
I intend to do this.

What it's waiting on is a patch to the monitor to allow an arbitrary 
connection to have an NRT associated with it (this appears to have 
existed previously, but was removed).  My Extended mode FTP server was 
designed from day zero to not care what transport it runs on.  It could 
trivially handle DECnet, but needs the monitor patch in order to be 
started as the top level fork in an NRT job.

There is also a bug that only surfaces when doing paged retrieves of 
extremely large files.  It's what kept me from getting it into MRC's 
last PANDA distribution.

I have a number of rabbit holes to come up from to get back to that...

On 11/7/21 9:54 PM, Peter Lothberg wrote:
> In  the "old days" we did SMTP over DECnet, has anyone considered 
> doing Telnet, FTP, HTTP etc over
> DECnet transport?
>
> -P
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sonic.net/pipermail/hecnet-list/attachments/20211107/43c6a77b/attachment.htm>