[HECnet] PyDECnet setup

[Robert Armstrong]

>Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
>"zero counters" should be straightforward.

  Nice, although I personally don't use the counters much (sometimes, but not often).

>Circuit state (on/off) is a bit of work because routing gets involved

  This one would be really useful, particularly when there's a problem with a specific link (which seems to happen from time to time).

>Changing circuit or executor parameters may be easy or not, it depends on the parameter.

  Don't have much need for changing executor parameters, ever.  The only circuit parameter that I might want to change (that I can think of) would be the cost.  That would be handy, but it will potentially alter the routing.  I suppose the ports and IP might be nice to change, but unless it has some way to automatically propagate back into the config file I wouldn't use that.  

>Creating new circuits (additional circuits) may not be as hard as I thought.

  Nice, but I don't think I'd ever do that on the fly.  Well, maybe for testing but still, not that often.  The problem is that I'd still have to edit the config file to make the new circuit permanent, and if I'm going to do that then I might was well just restart pyDECnet and let it re-read the config.

  Another suggestion I have is if there's a bad circuit definition in the config (e.g. a syntax error or whatever) then don't die; just ignore that circuit.  Right now the whole pyDECnet bombs if there's any error in the config.  Some things probably can't be ignored, like errors in the system definition, but when you have 10-15 circuits defined a single bad one shouldn't kill them all.

Thanks,
Bob