On (10:22 21/10/09), Sampsa Laine wrote:
I'm starting to get concerned that HECnet is almost running TOO well,
i.e. there's not much left to tweak :)
Where should we go from here? Setting up our own virtual X.25 PSDN
tunnelled over IP maybe? Something crazy with SNA?
An ISO TP4 / DECnet Phase V network with IS-IS routing would be very cool,
and support Hobbyist licensed X.400 mail and X.500 directory services,
terminal sessions via VT and file transfer via FTAM. And with a bit of
poking the last free Isode (ISO Development Environment) release - v8.0.2
IIRC - might be made to work on NetBSD.
SNA would be very cool too.
Cheers,
Andrew
--
Andrew Back
a at smokebelch.org
Hi,
just one humble little detail, thus a direct mail and not to the list... (Sorry I'm some days after in reading/commenting this storm of messages)
Once upon time, right about the time when those computers we are now "playing" with were new, there was US-ASCII, a 7 bit character encoding scheme, representing, amongst others, the 26 characters used in English writing. But in other countries, like here in Sweden, we use some other number of characters in our alpabet - swedish uses 29 letters, russian uses 33, for example.
So, a "local code" was develped, where some few of the rarely used tokens of the US-ASCII-scheme was instead used for those extra 6 letters (lower and upper case of 3 letters).
This was set in the ISO 646 standard, set 1975/12/01 - locally named SEN 85 02 00 Annex B
Here those letters are represented as:
0x7d }
0x7b {
0x7c |
0x5d ]
0x5b [
0x5c \
So, if I'm writing my given name (G ran) in that 7-bit coding, as we often do in those old systems, I'll write it G|ran. In an old system (might be old version RSX, might be RT-11 or migt be TOPS-10), I'd have to use that format.
These extra letters are quite common in daily writing and in names as they are wowels. I guess that the system descriptions you are trying to find a suitable format to encode most likely will contain names of owner/manager/..., end eventually also a city name as location. There are several citys inside Sweden containing these tokens (like \rebro, \regrund, \rkelljunga, G|teborg, Malm|, V}nersborg, Lax{, ...), not to mention several popular personal and family-names
Besides, there is an extra "tweak" to this.
If i write these letters in "DEC Multinational", almost identical (in this respect) to ISO-LATIN-1, but strip the 8:th bit (not uncommon, try a VT-100 terminal or equivalent "telnet" 7-bit "of the shelf"!), You would end up with getting edvEDV.
In those old dyas, the department secratary quite easilly managed to sort out post (from SUN microsystems) sent to mr. Gveran Eheling (my name is G ran hling), even though my dep. used DEC computers, that had working 8-bit...
So, to end up this E-mail:
Would possibly the : or the ; be a better separator than the | , as I really think these characters are more rarely used than the pipe!
An alternative might be the #
All my best,
G ran hling .EQ. G|ran ]hling .EQ. Goeran AAhling .NE. Goran Ahling
(Missconfigured printer might even print it as Gveran Ehling, but is it still NOT Goran Ahling, that would be another given name and another family name).
Sampsa Laine wrote:
Why? What would that accomplish that the pipe separated format doesn't except make things uglier? The reason I chose the pipe symbol is because this way we don't have to quote strings as people very seldomly use pipe symbols, but do use commas all the time...
On 21 Oct 2009, at 02:15, Steve Davidson wrote:
Let's try this again...
Any chance this could be in comma separated format? Put strings in
quotes if necessary.
-Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On
Behalf Of Sampsa Laine
Sent: Tuesday, October 20, 2009 19:43
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] HECnet crawler and INFO.TXT
I've updated CHIMPY in the same format.
Sampsa
On 21 Oct 2009, at 00:26, Bob Armstrong wrote:
I took Sampsa's suggestion and put an INFO.TXT on CODA with a
machine
readable section at the end that contains information about the
local nodes.
I already wrote a little DCL script that crawls the HECnet and
collects all
the INFO.TXT files that it can find (so far there are eight,
counting mine)
and if enough people adopt this format I'll write another little
script to
parse out the node information.
The format is pretty straight forward - you can just type out
CODA::INFO.TXT and see for yourself.
Bob
Bob
The hecnet.eu mx record now points to your mail.jfcl.com dns entry.
Have fun!
Regards, Mark.
On Tue, 2009-10-20 at 11:59 -0700, Bob Armstrong wrote:
Mark -
You can put in an MX record for *.mail11.hecnet.eu that points to
mail.jfcl.com if you want. I have no objection, but if you do be sure to
let me know so that I can configure my SMTP server to accept mail for that
domain (otherwise you'll get "550 Relay not allowed...").
If you want to host my DCN Node List on that site it'd be nice. Just give
me a place to put it and a way to upload updates.
Bob
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf
Of Mark Wickens
Sent: Tuesday, October 20, 2009 11:42 AM
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: [HECnet] Domain registration hecnet.eu
Guys,
I've just registered hecnet.eu - should be sorted within 24 hours.
So, if we can agree amongst ourselves the best way forward with a mail
gateway then I can point mail.hecnet.eu (or some variant) to the
designated gateway.
I'm going to create a website under www.hecnet.eu - this will be a
community effort between us all I'm anticipating, so how would you like
to go forward - it'll be hosted on the newly acquired vaxstation
4000/VLC under WASD ideally, and what I'd like to do is open it up so
that people can edit files directly via hecnet to add their bit. Is that
an agreeable course of action?
Regards, Mark.
--
Fred wrote:
I thought SNA mostly ran on Token Ring or something?
I have an IBM PS/2 model (something) with both an MCA Token Ring card and and MCA Ethernet - and I even have a passive Token Ring Mau! (and a cable, somewhere ...)
There were also MCA cards for making a PS/2 emulate a SNA-connected terminal over coax. And, BTW, all MAUs are passive. The active device is called a CAU. *shrug*
Now if I could just find that gateway software. When I had access to a real mainframe, all of the PC's went through a handful of these PS/2's via Ethernet, and the PS/2's had token ring cards in them connected to a real FEP.
Cisco and Madge actually sold a significant number of devices for doing precisely this, back in the day.
Peace... Sridhar
Fred wrote:
On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Sampsa Laine wrote:
Where should we go from here? Setting up our own virtual X.25 PSDN tunnelled over IP maybe? Something crazy with SNA?
SNA! SNA! :)
I could set up Hercules here running MVS 3.8J ... ;) I'm sure the folks have been able to get SNA to work within the emulator. I set up Hercules and MVS once, but other than a novelty, I really didn't do much with it, because most of my associates wouldn't know a mainframe if it ran them over. I think it would be interesting to get something quasi-public (on HECmet) going.
Plus, I have real IBM mainframe iron.
Peace... Sridhar
Brian Hechinger wrote:
* DECnet for BSD, especially 2.11 PDP-11 bsd. Yes, a 16 bit version is
significantly harder than a 32 bit version, I know, but there are several
real PDP11s out there running BSD that could be on HECnet. I know - I've
got one! We could use the Linux DECnet as a starting point - the dn
userspace utility programs might not even be that hard to port - but we'd
need a kernel wizard to do the tricky bits :-)
I know just the guy. If you are serious about this, please let me know and
I'll see if he's interested in helping out. I think the last time I talked
to him he mentioned about lacking an ethernet controller for his PDP-11.
Anyway, he's a professor for the university I work at. PhD in Neurology of
all things, but he's one hell of a programmer. He wrote kernel patches for
BSD 2.11 (i think, it might have been 2.09) for the PDP-11/73 CPU which it
seems had a bug in it that DEC had patched all their OSes to work around.
Smart cat. Don't know how interested he'd be though. I can always ask.
As usual, it's all about time. I've done a number of patches and small fixes in the kernel of 2.11BSD myself. It's not that magic.
But it requires time, and first of all, you need to have a fairly good understanding of DECnet, which will take some reading, and talking with people. Then you can start thinking about how the API should look like. The concepts in DECnet are slightly different than TCP/IP for instance, so you cannot have an API that looks like the TCP/IP one here, but need to do something else. I suspect it might be a good idea to look how the interface in Ultrix looks like, and try to model it after that.
Johnny
* DECnet for BSD, especially 2.11 PDP-11 bsd. Yes, a 16 bit version is
significantly harder than a 32 bit version, I know, but there are several
real PDP11s out there running BSD that could be on HECnet. I know - I've
got one! We could use the Linux DECnet as a starting point - the dn
userspace utility programs might not even be that hard to port - but we'd
need a kernel wizard to do the tricky bits :-)
I know just the guy. If you are serious about this, please let me know and
I'll see if he's interested in helping out. I think the last time I talked
to him he mentioned about lacking an ethernet controller for his PDP-11.
Anyway, he's a professor for the university I work at. PhD in Neurology of
all things, but he's one hell of a programmer. He wrote kernel patches for
BSD 2.11 (i think, it might have been 2.09) for the PDP-11/73 CPU which it
seems had a bug in it that DEC had patched all their OSes to work around.
Smart cat. Don't know how interested he'd be though. I can always ask.
-brian
--
"Coding in C is like sending a 3 year old to do groceries. You gotta
tell them exactly what you want or you'll end up with a cupboard full of
pop tarts and pancake mix." -- IRC User (http://www.bash.org/?841435)
On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 10:26:43AM -0400, Fred wrote:
I thought SNA mostly ran on Token Ring or something?
I have an IBM PS/2 model (something) with both an MCA Token Ring card and
and MCA Ethernet - and I even have a passive Token Ring Mau! (and a cable,
somewhere ...)
Do you need/want a cisco 4500 router and some token ring interfaces? Got
more token ring cards for the 4000 series cisco routers than I know what
to do with. Ok, granted 1 is more than I know what to do with, but I've
got more than that. :)
-brian
--
"Coding in C is like sending a 3 year old to do groceries. You gotta
tell them exactly what you want or you'll end up with a cupboard full of
pop tarts and pancake mix." -- IRC User (http://www.bash.org/?841435)
I can take a look at imaging it. It is RX50 format. I do have a complete set of "orange" binders with updates. I seem to remember that it is four (4) 3-inch binders, but I'll have to check.
-Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE on behalf of Zane H. Healy
Sent: Wed 10/21/2009 10:41
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: RE: [HECnet] Next retro comms project?
At 10:07 AM -0400 10/21/09, Steve Davidson wrote:
I have a DECnet kit for RT-11. From what I remember it is HUGE!
It can not make use of I/D space so at one point RT Engineering stopped
development on it. When I joined the RT group in 1984 I was supposed to
work on DECnet but within a week of me joining they cancelled the project.
I had a hard time understanding why a company that billed itself as
a network connected company would ever cancel such a product! I
wound up doing user-mode utilities and SPR's instead. Yuch!
Any chance you can image the kit and make it available? If it's that
old it's covered by the Supnik license. Do you have documentation?
As I just mentioned in a post, I've been looking for this for years!
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
